And the Anger Began to Ferment
On Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President
James Wham
Henry Fonda for President
Director ALEXANDER HORWATH
Year
2024
Country AUSTRIA, GERMANY
“This country of ours,
despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois
In the Red Summer of 1919, a white woman named Agnes Loebeck from Omaha, Nebraska falsely reported that she had been sexually assaulted by a black man. She later identified 41-year-old packinghouse worker Will Brown as the assailant. Brown was arrested and taken into custody at the Douglas County Courthouse; three days later, a mob of roughly 10,000 people assembled around the building with torches and guns looted from nearby stores. They set fire to the courthouse at 8:30 p.m. that evening and denied firefighters entry, then seized the building and knocked Brown unconscious, stripping him naked and dragging him into the street. A rope was placed around his neck, and he was lynched. His hanging body was shot, stabbed, dragged, and then burned. Segments of the rope were later sold off for 10 cents apiece.
Viewing these horrors from the second-story window of his father’s print shop was then 14-year-old Henry Fonda. This “most horrendous sight” was one the actor recalled many times in interviews throughout his life, including a Playboy interview conducted by Lawrence Grobel in 1981, just a year before Fonda died. “My dad never lectured,” Fonda recalls in a sick, warbled voice. “We watched.” Using the audio from Grobel’s interview (conducted over the course of a week at the Fonda residence, in two-hour stints), Fonda becomes the ghostly narrator of his own life in Alexander Horwath’s directorial debut Henry Fonda for President. Horwath, who previously served as the director of both the Viennale (1992-1997) and the Austrian Film Museum (2002-2017), uses Fonda’s life—his films, characters, gestures—to elucidate the past century of American history and beyond, interpolating present-day footage with Fonda’s offscreen narration. As Fonda recalls the lynching of Will Brown off-screen, we see the courthouse, the street corner where Brown was hanged, as they are today. Horwath shows himself flipping through archival images of the event—including one photograph of the suited, smiling mob posing beside Brown’s charred corpse.
Howarth’s approach is cinephilic, academic, but also, crucially, that of an outsider, a foreigner looking in at this strange nation by way of its own cultural dream life. “Fonda’s cinema revolves around the figure of the ‘wrong man’ and the society that produces him,” Horwath tells us in voiceover. “A legal system that allows prejudice to influence decision. A media system that caters to popular sentiment rather than supporting the rule of law. Attempts at historic justice that are too little, too late.” Fonda’s telling of the Will Brown tragedy is bookended by footage from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943); in both films, his characters intervene in lynchings. In the latter film, Fonda’s Gil Carter states: “Hanging’s any man’s business that’s around.”
Horwath positions Fonda as an acteur with as much authorship of his films as their directors, making the implicit claim that Fonda chose such roles as means of addressing the past (Luc Moullet had considered the actor for his 1993 Politique des acteurs, but decided, ultimately, that Fonda “stands out a little too much”). Fonda seems to have rejected the idea that he had any agency at all. “The message isn’t mine, it’s the author’s,” he says on The Dick Cavett Show—to which the host replies: “The way you tell it is.” James Baldwin evidently agreed; in The Devil Finds Work (1976), Baldwin writes that Fonda was the only actor of that era with whom he was able to identify. “I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had coloured blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don't walk like that!”
It was Raymond Durgnat who said that a nation’s history is written in its stars. Richard Dyer developed this idea further in his 1979 book Stars. He looks at Jane Fonda as one of the key star texts (Moullet: “is it possible to speak of Henry Fonda without speaking of Jane Fonda?”), seeing her image “in terms of the multiplicity of its meanings.” Horwath’s approach is the same, breaking down each role in terms of its historical moment, political heft, and personal consequence. Henry Fonda for President, however, is more than mere star ‘text’—it is an elegy for a time when film mattered, when cinema produced a history of its own. The thesis Horwath puts forward across these three hours—that Fonda embodies the nation—only functions because of the strength of that nation’s cultural production. (One is reminded, with regards to Grapes of Wrath, that the most recent film adaptation of Steinbeck belongs to James Franco.) It’s hard to envisage the present Pentagon-produced gloss having so much socio-political impact—imagine holding Timothée Chalamet up as a useful counterpoint to the American president—and there’s some intimation of this loss in the middle of the film. By this point, Fonda has retired to the theatre, Howarth filling the screen with images of Time Square. A Trump impersonator directs traffic, half dancing that YMCA-wiggle. People film a bunch of nonsense on their phones. Ads fill the frame. Fonda, meanwhile, is long gone.
It’s not that Hollywood today is ahistorical, apolitical—it’s just that those histories and politics are so homogenised in service of capital one barely bothers to notice. (Critics certainly don’t, and the younger generation isn’t even watching.) The idea of a figure like Fonda being radicalised by injustice and forcing that feeling out through his filmography seems impossible today. Fonda said many times in his life that he hoped to be a Tom Joad for his own generation. One touching moment, late in the film, shows one of his drawings—a copy of Grapes of Wrath flayed open with a magnifying glass over what we must presume to be one of Fonda’s favourite passages. The final line reads: “And the anger began to ferment.”
James Wham lives in London and writes for The Baffler and New Left Review.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Henry Fonda for President at Barbican Cinema, 10 May 2025.
—W.E.B. Du Bois
In the Red Summer of 1919, a white woman named Agnes Loebeck from Omaha, Nebraska falsely reported that she had been sexually assaulted by a black man. She later identified 41-year-old packinghouse worker Will Brown as the assailant. Brown was arrested and taken into custody at the Douglas County Courthouse; three days later, a mob of roughly 10,000 people assembled around the building with torches and guns looted from nearby stores. They set fire to the courthouse at 8:30 p.m. that evening and denied firefighters entry, then seized the building and knocked Brown unconscious, stripping him naked and dragging him into the street. A rope was placed around his neck, and he was lynched. His hanging body was shot, stabbed, dragged, and then burned. Segments of the rope were later sold off for 10 cents apiece.
Viewing these horrors from the second-story window of his father’s print shop was then 14-year-old Henry Fonda. This “most horrendous sight” was one the actor recalled many times in interviews throughout his life, including a Playboy interview conducted by Lawrence Grobel in 1981, just a year before Fonda died. “My dad never lectured,” Fonda recalls in a sick, warbled voice. “We watched.” Using the audio from Grobel’s interview (conducted over the course of a week at the Fonda residence, in two-hour stints), Fonda becomes the ghostly narrator of his own life in Alexander Horwath’s directorial debut Henry Fonda for President. Horwath, who previously served as the director of both the Viennale (1992-1997) and the Austrian Film Museum (2002-2017), uses Fonda’s life—his films, characters, gestures—to elucidate the past century of American history and beyond, interpolating present-day footage with Fonda’s offscreen narration. As Fonda recalls the lynching of Will Brown off-screen, we see the courthouse, the street corner where Brown was hanged, as they are today. Horwath shows himself flipping through archival images of the event—including one photograph of the suited, smiling mob posing beside Brown’s charred corpse.
Howarth’s approach is cinephilic, academic, but also, crucially, that of an outsider, a foreigner looking in at this strange nation by way of its own cultural dream life. “Fonda’s cinema revolves around the figure of the ‘wrong man’ and the society that produces him,” Horwath tells us in voiceover. “A legal system that allows prejudice to influence decision. A media system that caters to popular sentiment rather than supporting the rule of law. Attempts at historic justice that are too little, too late.” Fonda’s telling of the Will Brown tragedy is bookended by footage from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943); in both films, his characters intervene in lynchings. In the latter film, Fonda’s Gil Carter states: “Hanging’s any man’s business that’s around.”
Horwath positions Fonda as an acteur with as much authorship of his films as their directors, making the implicit claim that Fonda chose such roles as means of addressing the past (Luc Moullet had considered the actor for his 1993 Politique des acteurs, but decided, ultimately, that Fonda “stands out a little too much”). Fonda seems to have rejected the idea that he had any agency at all. “The message isn’t mine, it’s the author’s,” he says on The Dick Cavett Show—to which the host replies: “The way you tell it is.” James Baldwin evidently agreed; in The Devil Finds Work (1976), Baldwin writes that Fonda was the only actor of that era with whom he was able to identify. “I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had coloured blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don't walk like that!”
It was Raymond Durgnat who said that a nation’s history is written in its stars. Richard Dyer developed this idea further in his 1979 book Stars. He looks at Jane Fonda as one of the key star texts (Moullet: “is it possible to speak of Henry Fonda without speaking of Jane Fonda?”), seeing her image “in terms of the multiplicity of its meanings.” Horwath’s approach is the same, breaking down each role in terms of its historical moment, political heft, and personal consequence. Henry Fonda for President, however, is more than mere star ‘text’—it is an elegy for a time when film mattered, when cinema produced a history of its own. The thesis Horwath puts forward across these three hours—that Fonda embodies the nation—only functions because of the strength of that nation’s cultural production. (One is reminded, with regards to Grapes of Wrath, that the most recent film adaptation of Steinbeck belongs to James Franco.) It’s hard to envisage the present Pentagon-produced gloss having so much socio-political impact—imagine holding Timothée Chalamet up as a useful counterpoint to the American president—and there’s some intimation of this loss in the middle of the film. By this point, Fonda has retired to the theatre, Howarth filling the screen with images of Time Square. A Trump impersonator directs traffic, half dancing that YMCA-wiggle. People film a bunch of nonsense on their phones. Ads fill the frame. Fonda, meanwhile, is long gone.
It’s not that Hollywood today is ahistorical, apolitical—it’s just that those histories and politics are so homogenised in service of capital one barely bothers to notice. (Critics certainly don’t, and the younger generation isn’t even watching.) The idea of a figure like Fonda being radicalised by injustice and forcing that feeling out through his filmography seems impossible today. Fonda said many times in his life that he hoped to be a Tom Joad for his own generation. One touching moment, late in the film, shows one of his drawings—a copy of Grapes of Wrath flayed open with a magnifying glass over what we must presume to be one of Fonda’s favourite passages. The final line reads: “And the anger began to ferment.”
James Wham lives in London and writes for The Baffler and New Left Review.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Henry Fonda for President at Barbican Cinema, 10 May 2025.