Saturday, March 23, 2013

"....Jane Fonda can quiver like a tuning fork..."
Kenneth Tynan (in a review of the play Invitation to a March, 1960)
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Jane Fonda worked hard to get the role of Lillian Hellman in Julia, based on stories from Hellman's 1973 memoir, Pentimento. Before the book was published, even, her agent had forwarded some of the galleys to Fonda. Hellman herself was more skeptical about Fonda, reportedly wanting Barbra Streisand instead.

Jane Fonda was making a return to mainstream American movies in 1977. Early in the year, she starred with George Segal in Fun With Dick and Jane, and her reviews were extraordinary (even if her performance was not.) In the fall, she starred as Lillian Hellman in Julia, one of the highly publicized films focusing on women.

Two films early in the decade--They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Klute (1971)--had established Fonda as the premier American dramatic film actress of her generation. Then in her early mid-30's, her intelligence, edge, and talent made her a peer of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis at similar ages. She won an Academy Award for Klute. Then, a few months later in July [?] 1975, Fonda traveled to North Vietnam and posed with the Vietcong--enemies of American soldiers during the height of the Vietnam War. She became widely hated in the United States and, reportedly, was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood.

By 1976, the Vietnam War had ended, and Nixon had resigned as President in ____ 1974 following the Watergate scandal. The mood, the awareness, of the country changed. Films starring Fonda were able to find financing. Her first film back, was a comedy, calculated by Fonda herself to help her transition back to mainstream acceptance. Fonda played Jane, who with her husband Dick turned to robbing banks to maintain their suburban lifestyle after Dick lost his job. Despite its theme, the film was fluff, and Fonda was lightweight in it. But somehow she got some rave reviews. Molly Haskell, Vincent Canby, and John Simon all cheered loudly for Fonda, and Stanley Kauffmann, over a year later, wrote, "..

Julia, released in October 1977, was next. Fonda played the playwright Lillian Hellman to Vanessa Redgrave's Julia, a friend Hellman had written about in her memoir, Pentimento. The British Redgrave, herself highly controversial politically, was also highly regarded as an actress. The casting of Fonda and Redgrave put Julia at the vanguard, with the The Turning Point and some other movies, of what at the time heralded as a new age for women in film. For the second time in her career, for its October 10, 1977 edition, Fonda made the cover of Newsweek.


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Critics were ecstatic over Redgrave's performance as Julia. Although the title role, Julia actually has only a few scenes, in which we see her through Lillian's reverential eyes. Julia is heroically courageous; a wealthy young woman who has joined the underground movement against the Nazis in Vienna in the years leading up to World War II.  Pauline Kael wrote,
"…. This saintly Freudian Marxist queen … might have been a joke with almost anyone but Vanessa Redgrave in the role…. Redgrave is so well endowed by nature to play queens that she can act simply in the role (which doesn’t embody much screen time) and casually, yet lyrically, embody Lillian Hellman’s dream friend….
Redgrave won the Academy Award as a heavy favorite despite ..... Her acceptance speech.....

Fonda's Lillian Hellman is in almost every scene. In her introduction to Pentimento, from which many of the episodes of Julia come, Hellman wrote, "....." Julia captures some of that feel. Flashbacks of Lillian's freindship with Julia are woven with Hellman's emergence as a successful playwright under the tutelage of Jason Robards's Dashiell Hammett. In the latter half, Julia tells of Lillian's smuggling money into Berlin for the underground. About this episode, David Thomson wrote, "....."

Although Fonda was second runner-up to Diane Keaton and Shelley Duvall for both the New York and National Society of Film Critics awards [actually, I need to verify that], the critics were divided over her performance, as can be noted below. Two of her earlier, strongest supporters, Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffman--although they differed, as usual, about her performance itself--both felt she was limited by the script.

For me, though, Fonda's Lillian Hellman was the premier contemporary film performance when I first started paying close attention to film acting. I was not a maverick--In an outstanding year for film actresses, Fonda's performance had weight. As expected, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, and she was in the running for the win. She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Dramatic Actress, and was a second or third runner-up in the New York Film _____ and National Society of Film Critics. That's a distinction for 1977.

When Diane Keaton won the Oscar for Annie Hall, she exclaimed, "You just don't beat Jane Fonda, or Shirley MacLaine, or Anne Bancroft, or Marsha Mason...", with special emphasis on Fonda's name. By that point, Coming Home, for which Fonda would win the Academy Award the next year, had also been released. And she was Jane Fonda.

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