Jane Fonda
Klute
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Hi hello how the hell are ya, dear reader? We’ve made it to the end of July and yet the heat is still rising, Labubus are still en vogue (thank god) and I’m still here watching double features. I wanted to dedicate a week to an actor whom I’ve always known as iconic and hilarious and genuinely impactful. She’s a star and an actress (which are two different things but she is both), producer, sex symbol, OG fitness influencer, author, activist, political and cultural wave-maker who has one of the longest Wikipedia pages of any filmmaker I’ve ever researched: Jane Fonda. Born on December 21, 1937, in Yorkville, Manhattan, Jane Seymour Fonda was named after the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother’s side. Her father, Henry Fonda, was a household name of an actor, and her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, tragically committed suicide when Jane was just 12. She begins her documentary, Jane Fonda: A Life in Five Acts, by speaking about her culturally-beloved father and their strained relationship, saying, “I grew up in the shadow of a national monument.” Jane always had an interest in the arts—at 15, Jane taught dance at the Fire Island Pines, and around this time she became a model—but it wasn’t until she dropped out of Vassar and met Lee Strasberg in 1958 that she really set her sights on acting. She once noted, “I went to the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father—who had to say so—told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!” Thus began Jane Fonda’s career as a stage actress—which really laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s, where she averaged about two movies a year throughout the decade. In 1963, she starred in Sunday in New York, and Newsday to call her “the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses.” However, she’s also had haters since day one, because this same year, the Harvard Lampoon named her the “Year’s Worst Actress” for The Chapman Report. Her role in Cat Ballou is considered to be her breakout, but Jane has had a myriad of career-making moments since. She was a sexy science fiction star in the iconic film Barbarella (for which my favorite club in Austin is named), a quirky romantic lead in Barefoot in the Park, occupying both gravely serious and ludicrously silly roles in Steelyard Blues, A Doll’s House, Fun with Dick and Jane, Julia, California Suite, The China Syndrome (which came out two weeks before Three Mile Island happened…), 9 to 5, On Golden Pond, Agnes of God, Old Gringo, Stanley and Iris, Monster-in-Law, Georgia Rule, The Butler, This Is Where I Leave You, Book Club, Grace and Frankie, my personal favorite 80 For Brady, and even seven episodes of a tv show called Stoner Cats, as well as J.Lo’s endlessly confusing album film This Is Me… Now. But Jane Fonda is an activist first, and a movie star second. I don’t even have the space to list all of her efforts and achievements in philanthropy and political activism. She’s been a vocal advocate of the LGBTQ+ community, long before it was cool—even acting as a beard to a handful of gay men in the public eye including dancer Timmy Everett, theater director Andreas Voutsinas, and actor Earl Holliman. She’s a lifelong vocal feminist, champion of civil rights, and political radical—supporting the Black Panthers, and helping found the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee. Along with Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland, she formed the FTA tour (“Free The Army”, a play on the troop expression “Fuck The Army”), an anti-war road show designed as an answer to Bob Hope’s USO tour. Described as “political vaudeville” by Fonda, they toured military towns along the West Coast, aiming to establish a dialogue with soldiers about their upcoming deployments to Vietnam. Fonda visited Vietnam in July 1972, traveling to Hanoi to witness the devastation, and after touring and photographing dike systems in North Vietnam, she discovered and revealed that the United States had been intentionally targeting this system along the Red River. She was photographed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun; the infamous photo outraged many Americans and earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane”. In her 2005 autobiography, she wrote that she was manipulated into sitting on the battery; she had been horrified at the implications of the pictures, and was effectively one of the first female celebs to be cancelled. She was one of Nixon’s greatest enemies, and it was clear that the candor and bravery spilling out of this girl-next-door was unnerving and threatening to the conservatives of this era. She created the best-selling home video of all time with Jane Fonda’s Workout—the proceeds of which funded her political activism and charities. In 2001, she established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University in Atlanta to help prevent adolescent pregnancy through training and program development. On February 16, 2004, Fonda led a march through Ciudad Juárez with Sally Field, Eve Ensler and other women, urging Mexico to provide sufficient resources to newly appointed officials in helping investigate the murders of hundreds of women in the border city. This same year, she also served as a mentor to the first all-trans cast of The Vagina Monologues, and in the days before the 2006 Swedish elections, Fonda went to Sweden to support the new political party Feministiskt initiativ in their election campaign. And this is to say nothing of her environmental activism, her work with indigenous peoples, her strong stance against AI, her many books and times being arrested for protesting and raising awareness about climate change and the ongoing forced famine in Gaza. She recently said, “Why be a celebrity if you can’t leverage it for something that’s important?” and boy, do I wish more people in her position had this attitude. She’s one of the rare celebs who actually puts her money where her mouth is (even at age 87), stays informed and educated, and most importantly, has never lost touch with her humanity. Jane is such an icon and a hero and a true bad bitch, I had to finally make an effort to watch more of her films, instead of rewatching 9 to 5 again for the millionth time.
Let’s begin with the film that finally earned her her (first) Best Actress Oscar, this is Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 neo-noir thriller Klute. Brothers Andy and Dave Lewis wrote the script, which was inspired by a serial from their childhood, as well as this period’s uniquely American brand of paranoia and growing anxiety surrounding surveillance (even pre-Watergate.) Klute follows Donald Sutherland as John Klute, a private detective hired to track down his missing friend, chemical company executive Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli.) Tom went missing months ago, and all the police have found are a handful of obscene letters Tom addressed but never sent to a call girl in NYC, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda.) Frustrated with the lack of results, Tom and Klute’s mutual friend Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi) urges Klute to take the investigation into his own hands, and before we can blink, Klute is in NYC and has already tracked down Bree Daniels. I say this film follows Klute, and is even named after him, but Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels is the true heroine of this story. Bree is a part-time model who aspires to be more, but in the meantime she is a very in-demand sex worker who dresses in chic midi-skirts and sweaters, and laments about her life to her therapist. Klute rents a room in Bree’s building, taps her phone, and follows her around to see how she’s connected to his missing friend, but even when he finally confronts her face-to-face, she has no intel for him. As another detective notes, “a good call girl turns six or seven hundred tricks a year, so faces get blurred.” Bree tells Klute he’s wasting his time, but all the while she’s consistently receiving creepy phone calls, where no one is on the other line, and it’s clear that she’s being followed—but by whom? Tom, or someone else? Klute and Bree have a compelling dynamic and an effective partnership in solving this case, and between Bree’s hardened charisma and Klute’s simple, quiet, lanky determination, the two form a fun and organic chemistry. I’ve had a crush on Donald Sutherland since forever, so it’s no surprise that his sturdy, steely, gentle giant vibes won over Bree Daniels AND Jane Fonda, IRL. (One could get lost in either of their icy blue eyes, tbh.) Part of makes Klute such an intriguing watch isn’t just the Hitchcockian mystery at its center, but its the empathetic and informed way in which Jane Fonda played her character. Beyond accidentally creating an iconic haircut that would long be imitated and called “the Klute”, and donning some of the grooviest Winter clothing I’ve ever seen, Jane really embodied this role. She even went out of her way to research it, and spent a week with real-life call girls and madams, accompanying them to after-hours clubs to solicit men—where Fonda noticed that none of the men showed any interest in her, because they could tell she was an “upper-class, privileged pretender”, according to Fonda. Because of her performance and the considerate way this role was written, Bree is the most interesting character, whom we witness in real time becoming the true focus as the film carries on. She is afforded so much agency, intelligence, heart, and satisfying complexity for this kind of role—it all felt very ahead of its time, particularly her Tony Soprano-esque convos with her shrink, which were 100% improvised(!!!!). And I’m not sure if anyone’s ever been cooler than Jane Fonda, getting home from a meeting with a trick, putting on her hot pink kaftan and smoking a joint in her NYC studio apartment. Klute is a dark, smoky, creepy, suspenseful film, one that utilizes every shadow, natural light, and performer. It doesn’t have the most shocking resolution, but it really builds a genuine tension in its pacing, writing, and its terrifying score by composer Michael Small. It was great to see Roy Scheider (again, immediately) and it’s always a thrill to watch a small-town detective take on a big-city case—especially a case as freaky as this one.
I followed Klute up with another big movie blind spot of mine, a film I’ve been recommended a lot and could tell I would love because like Klute, it seemed like a bit of an accidental horror movie, this is Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Based on Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel of the same name, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? transports us to 1932 California, where a dance marathon is about to take place. This is the kind of depraved, exploitative spectacle that could only come from humanity, at our worst, at the height of the Great Depression—but as it goes on, it becomes all the more apparent that we’ve always existed in a dystopia. Homeless drifter Robert Syverson (Michael Sarrazin) wanders into a shabby ballroom just in time to take the place of Gloria Beatty’s (Jane Fonda) partner, who’s just been disqualified for being sick. The rules are as follows: you must compete with a partner, you must dance the whole time (except for the allotted 10-minute breaks that occur every two hours), and the last couple standing will get to split $1,500. We follow the bitter Gloria and her stranger of a partner Robert, retired sailor Harry Kline (Red Buttons) and his partner, the emotionally fragile aspiring actress Alice (Susannah York) and her partner, and a young farmer (Bruce Dern) and his pregnant wife of a partner (Bonnie Bedelia.) Robert, just trying to make conversation, asks Gloria why she lives in California, to which she dryly responds, “Because you don’t freeze while you’re starving.” Gloria is not up for small talk, but Robert is trying to be pleasant as the hours of dancing turn into days and weeks of barely shuffling on their steadily-weakened legs. All of the competitors are given meals and lodging, but they barely have time to indulge in any of these luxuries, as the menacing airhorn blares frequently and alerts that it’s time to go back to the dancefloor. As the competition continues and the desperate competitors thin out, the audience of wealthy gawkers grows and builds and certain attendees begin to sponsor certain couples. At times, couples are allowed to do a solo performance near the host’s stage, and the crowd tosses pennies at them—and even though pennies were actually worth something back then, it is still unbelievably demeaning. The host, Rocky Gravo (Gig Young), is marathoning himself, trying to play up the storylines and identities of each competitor, to get the audience interested and invested. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is such a contained and simple movie in a way, and yet its impact is large and heavy on your chest as you dance your way through it. It’s always extra bleak to watch a bleak movie from the past, set in an even bleaker time in the further past, in our still bleak present. It’s not just simple dance competitions anymore, it’s hellish reality competition shows and real-life “Squid Games” because we are still a financially unstable and imbalanced society, only now we don’t even learn from the art made about our unstable realities. Not to be a bummer but, this movie was a bummer! But it was also engrossing, heart-pounding, and terrifying in the way The Hunger Games is. But whether we’re examining Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is further proof that these fictional dystopian nightmares are only slightly exaggerated reflections of the world we’ve always occupied under capitalism and human greed. This ghoulish, agonizing, torturous contest begins to take a terrifying physical toll on every competitor—the lack of sleep and proper nourishment and sunshine begins to really show, and honestly, it’s exhausting just to watch. When they reach 30 days of consecutive dancing, you think it can’t possibly get more brutal, but They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? doesn’t skimp on the tension, pain, and cruelty on full, uncomfortable display in this sort of arena. Apprently, Norman Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin wanted to collab in the 1950s, and after Lloyd purchased the rights to this novel, plans were made for Chaplin’s son Sydney to lead it alongside newcomer Marilyn Monroe. Once arrangements were completed in 1952, Chaplin took his family on what was intended to be a brief trip to the UK for the premiere of Limelight. During this trip, however, J. Edgar Hoover negotiated to have his re-entry permit revoked, and the film project was swiftly cancelled—all because Chaplin was accused of being a communist supporter during the McCarthy era. It’s a shame that this version of the project never came to fruition, but I think what Sydney Pollack accomplished is a cinematic and psychological marvel. When Pollack and Fonda first met to discuss the script, she was surprised when he asked for her opinion, stating later in her autobiography, “It was the first time a director asked me for input on how I saw the character and the story… It was a germinal moment [for me] ... This was the first time in my life as an actor that I was working on a film about larger societal issues, and instead of my professional work feeling peripheral to life, it felt relevant.” Additionally, according to an interview with Michael Sarrazin, this film was shown to the public in Russia as a piece of anti-American propaganda to demonstrate the evils of capitalism, which would be very effective, if true. Both of tonight’s films were terrifically tense and had moments of sheer terror, all of which the star of the evening took on with grace and passion and her unique brand of moxie. They just don’t make nepo babies like Jane Fonda anymore, but I’ve fangirled enough for now. Thank you for reading along this week, dear reader, I’m very Fonda you! ;)
