PERHAPS when many people think of Jane Fonda today, their opinion of her as an actress/celebrity is based mostly on her American films. Admittedly, this opinion might be found mostly among those (Americans) who feel an old provincial reaction, vis-à-vis Europe’s historical advantage in artistic modernity. However, to be unaware of, or ignore, Fonda’s European-based films is to miss that initial quality which made Jane Fonda become one of Hollywood’s most unique actresses. Thanks to her relationship to Vadim, no doubt, she commuted professionally between Europe and America until 1972, after which she settled, it seems, into American films alone.
Yet, from the first film made on one of her returns to America in 1965, ‘CAT BALOU’, an offbeat Western, with her role sort of reminiscent of a Dale Evans comic-book personality, Fonda opened up a new chapter in her American films, a chapter definitely influenced by her European productions. This chapter had to do with a pronounced social rather than exclusively romantic relationship to men in film after film.
Fonda’s roles begin to bring out dormant exemplary qualities in men, via her enhancement rather than condemnation of their personalities. In this aspect of her roles, feminine power takes the lead through a subtle usurpation of the traditional male authority father figure.
In ‘Cat Balou’ for example, it is the ‘washed-up bad-man’, brilliantly played by Lee Marvin, whom Fonda employs and reforms. Marvin’s role was also an about-face to a multitude of roles in earlier Westerns and Film Noirs, where he was one of the most vicious ‘heavies’, along with Lee Van Cleef, Leo Gordon, and Jack Elam.
But there was something which distinguished Marvin from his peers, and this was the individual psychological distortions and twisted totalitarian reasoning he often exposed in his roles; he would erase this cinematic reputation with his bungling, inept, but humane role in ‘Cat Balou’, and win a deserved Academy Award for this reformation of the male ego, which Fonda with her role’s feminine daring and idealism, had acted as a mirror to.
The more we think of it, the more we realise Jane Fonda’s unapologetic respect for men who distinguish themselves in bold individualistic and morally complex ways. Her early respect for Marlon Brando, perhaps, had a magnetic effect which brought her into his orbit when she landed the co-starring role as the unfaithful wife of a young fugitive, played by Robert Redford, in ‘THE CHASE’ of 1966.
As the cool, morally unwavering Sherriff trying to prevent a hastily judgmental lynch mob from doing away with Redford, Brando laid down a precise memorable demonstration of his acting style, with all the long pauses, the gestural expressions of human warmth and sympathy, the linguistic hesitations, uncertainties, and mental calculations. One could feel Fonda’s enthusiastic participation in this film’s scenario.

Return to 1960s America

On a personal level, her return to America at a time when a utopian social vision, largely launched by the arts, fuelled the euphoric social lifestyle of the Hippies, radical black and white intellectuals, and others pushing for an end to segregated policies, and respect for normal intimacy between individuals of any racial background in America, had an effect on her. All of these social aspirations made the 1960s in North America and Europe the most amazing and greatest decade of the 20th Century, despite its horrific negative episodes.
Fonda’s cinematic art, like the exciting new Jazz, Rock, Soul and Motown music, the new abstract expressionist and pop art, the new fiction and poetry etc, was not only inspired by the times, but lent a hand towards changing America’s prejudicial attitudes.
In 1967, she starred in one such film which brought the values of the whole Civil Rights movement to a turning point, giving it public exposure as only cinematic art can.The film was ‘HURRY SUNDOWN’, directed by the bold European-born classic Hollywood director, Otto Preminger, who, in 1955, had directed ‘CARMEN JONES’, and in 1958 ‘PORGY & BESS’, both with Dorothy Dandridge, the first outstanding multi-talented Afro-American actress of worthy celebrity status.
Preminger’s uniqueness was filming from inside Black communities, using mostly all-Black casts and sets with authentic ethnic overtones, not imposing White stereotypical viewpoints. ‘Hurry Sundown’ was his first very integrated film, and added justified commitment to the drive for racial equality by its theme about hard-working black farmers trying to buy land they had worked on, despite the resistance of rich White landowners. But more than that, the film emerged at a turbulent time, when all the frozen uneducated prejudices were being rejected by White and Black American activists.
The film’s Black-and-White integrated crew were first refused permission to film in the State of Georgia, since people had witnessed their integrated behaviour at  a local hotel where they received mail and telephone threats, to the extent that armed State troopers had to guard their hotel. Fonda’s role as the idealistic White woman who helps the Black farmers achieve their goal became her introduction to Afro-American issues of social justice and equality, and this led to her close friendship with Angela Davis, the beautiful Black intellectual feminist writer and University lecturer who had expanded and clarified many radical themes raised by Herbert Marcuse, the renowned radical American University lecturer, philosopher and writer.
However, behind Fonda’s radicalization in ‘Hurry Sundown’ was the cinematic tradition of social commitment her father, Henry Fonda, had shown via great classic Hollywood films like ‘THE OXBOW INCIDENT,’ ‘THE GRAPES OF WRATH’ and ‘MISTER ROBERTS’ of later years.

American achievement
Combining cinematic art with real social work not only brought Fonda much publicity, but changed her personal life with her marriage to radical activist, Tom Hayden. There was also a price to pay, of course, for her bold criticisms of the State, and biased social conventions.
One biographer, Tom Collins, states that ex-President Nixon had her on a list he had circulated of his enemies, and she was arrested once on false drug charges for legal prescription drugs she had in her possession at an American airport. Yet all this should not distract us from the pragmatic social morality imparted by her roles. The fact that Fonda did not retreat into a ‘Gay’ feminist narcissism, but engaged men in joint professional and romantic activities distinguished her films. Certain actors like Alain Delon and Robert Redford made triple appearances with her: Delon was also in ‘HISTOIRES  EXTRAORDINAIRES’ and ‘SPIRITS OF THE DEAD’ in Europe 1968, and Redford also in ‘BAREFOOT IN THE PARK’ 1967, and ‘THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN’ 1979.
In 1978, she made the wonderful Western, ‘COMES A HORSEMAN’, in the role as a single female rancher who stands up to a cattle baron, aided ably by unique Hollywood veteran actor, James Caan, in another hip masculine role. Fonda’s knack became acting as the woman of conscience; sometimes the reporter helping a down-on-his-luck cowboy in ‘ELECTRIC HORSEMAN’, or discovering the covered-up danger of impending ecological disaster in ‘CHINA SYNDROME’.
In 1969, her role in ‘THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY’, based on Horace McCoy’s avant-garde novel, with Fonda as the nihilistic girl disenchanted with her Hollywood ambitions, found her in top form, full of needed anxiety, gestural and phonetic skill in a film that she really should have received an Academy Award for, though ‘KLUTE’ of 1979, as the tough New York call-girl, and ‘COMING HOME’ as the returning Vietnam veteran’s feminist wife had more public appeal.
Fonda’s zest for new unorthodox roles continued with Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘TOUT VA BIEN’, another look at film looking at itself, and ‘JULIA’, as the writer Lilian Hellman  who was Dashiel Hammett’s intellectual girl-friend and lover, and ‘9 to 5’, as one of the office women who tame their chauvinistic boss, and the brilliant ‘STANLEY AND IRIS’ of 1989, as the down-to-earth American girl who discovers Robert De Niro’s illiteracy and teaches him to read.
The feminine power in all these Jane Fonda roles reside in their human magnanimity. Are there older Hollywood actresses who are antecedents to her style? Yes; the fine emotional and sensual power of Dorothy Malone and Shirley Maclaine. What probably makes Jane Fonda, both as actress and lady, age gracefully is that precious quality of intellectual curiosity she adds to feminine sensuality.