Jane Fonda @ 70.

In Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978), Jane Fonda plays a politically naïve, conventional army wife, who works at a local hospital while her gung-ho husband (Bruce Dern) is away in Vietnam. There she meets former high-school classmate and ex-athlete (Jon Voight), now an embittered war veteran, paralysed from the waist down. This doesn't seem to have affected his sexual prowess and they become lovers. She becomes more liberated, changes her hairstyle and goes for rides along the beach with Voight in his wheelchair. She is made aware of the shabby way that the veterans are treated and even begins to question the war. Her transformation echoes, to a certain extent, the politicization of Jane Fonda.

Coming Home was shown at the Viennale (the Vienna International Film Festival) in October this year as part of a slightly premature 70th birthday tribute to Jane Fonda who, bewilderingly, becomes a septuagenarian today, December 21. (1937 was a vintage year for Hollywood stars. Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman were all born in the same year and are still active.)

When the lights came up after the film in Vienna, Fonda stepped onto the stage to enormous applause. Wearing a silver lame trouser suit, she had hardly altered from the 41-year-old star we had just seen on screen. Taking the microphone, she tearfully declared, "What is so sad for us seeing the film now is to realise that we Americans have learned nothing. We are still sending our young men and woman to die in Iraq. And that we're doing nothing for them when they come back. Not forgetting what we're doing to the Iraqi people. Although there was a draft back then, there is now a poverty draft. Poor people are being bribed by the military to go to war." This was the Jane Fonda that ex-hippies like to remember.

How did the privileged daughter of Henry Fonda, brought up in a totally film oriented environment in California, turn into an iconic radical figure? Her mother was Frances Seymour Brokaw, the widow of a multimillionaire who married Henry Fonda in 1936 and who died, when Jane was 12, by slitting her throat in a sanatorium where she had been confined after a series of nervous breakdowns. Jane, it is said, only discovered the facts of her mother's suicide when a school-mate casually handed her a magazine containing the story.

Notwithstanding this early trauma, her childhood was a relatively happy one. In 1955, when her father took the lead in the hit Broadway play Mister Roberts, she and younger brother Peter (born 1940), moved in with their grandmother who owned a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. At this period, acting for Jane was solely confined to high school plays, except for a couple of appearances with her father in an Omaha Community Theater production of Clifford Odets's The Country Girl and a summer stock performance of James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's 1948 play The Male Animal. In the latter, the professor character, played by Henry Fonda, confronting his Red-baiting trustees, says, "You can't suppress ideas because you don't like them. Not in this country. Not yet."

But Jane's early ambitions lay elsewhere, and though she dutifully attended and graduated from Vassar, there was enough nascent rebellion in her to make her decide to go to Paris to study art. On her return to the US, she decided that she was, after all, her father's daughter and, encouraged by Lee Strasberg, she signed on at the famed Actors Studio, paying for her courses by modelling. (She was twice featured on the cover of Vogue.)

1960 was the breakthrough year, but she didn't exactly make it on her own. Joshua Logan, a good friend of her father's, who had directed Mister Roberts, allowed Jane to make her Broadway debut in his production of There Was a Little Girl which, despite running a mere 16 performances, won her the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the magazine Theatre World's award as the season's most promising actress. Logan then cast her in her first film, Tall Story. With false eyelashes and falsies, she was quite pleasing in an irritating role as a girl with only marriage on her mind - a long way from the feminist she was to become. Though both the play and the film were received with indifference, they gave her the push she needed into stardom. Other films followed that exploited her persona as an All-American girl.

Her personal and professional life drastically changed direction in 1964 when she went to France to make La Ronde, a new version of the Schnitzler play which had been turned into a classic film in 1950 by Max Ophüls. The director this time was Roger Vadim, celebrated as the Svengali of "sex kitten" Brigitte Bardot. Fonda fell under his spell, married him and settled in Paris. Vadim then set about trying to turn her into another Bardot. Father Henry was reportedly mistrustful of his new son-in-law, and there was a great deal of sensationalist publicity; but Fonda remained friendly with her ex-husband after their divorce and, although critical of the way he treated women as sex objects, never made any slighting remark about him personally.

It was in France that she became radicalized. "All over French television one would see tens of thousands of American people in the streets protesting the war. It was the people on the streets of America that forced me to think of Vietnam." Another turning point was when she visited India in 1969. "I had never seen people die from starvation before or a boy begging with the corpse of his little brother in his arms... I met a lot of American kids there, hippies from wealthy or middle-class families in search of their individualist, metaphysical trips. They accepted that poverty. They even tried to explain it away to me."

On her return to California, where the contrast with the spectacle of wretchedness which she had just witnessed couldn't have been more flagrant, and emboldened by Marlon Brando, she began to speak out on various burning issues in the United States: the plight of Native Americans, the Black Panther movement, her support for which earned her numerous enemies and even alienated her father who once commented with disdain at her tendency to champion every social issue imaginable, calling her "Jane of Arc"; and, of course, the anti-war movement.

In 1970, she told a University of Michigan audience of some two thousand students, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist." At Duke University in North Carolina, she repeated what she had said in Michigan, adding, "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism."

In 1971, at the risk of surveillance and blacklisting, she founded an anti-war troupe, Entertainment Industry for Truth and Justice, which toured Southeast Asia, and went on to produce a film entitled FTA (Foxtrot Tango Alpha, Free the Army, Fuck the Army). This was intended to counterpoint the USO shows put on by Bob Hope and other performers who gave positive support to American soldiers.

Three years later, in defiance of government restraints and at the expense of alienating her public, she went with her future husband, the political activist Tom Hayden, to North Vietnam. A documentary of the trip, co-directed by herself and the cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who shared the platform with her in Vienna, calling her "a true patriot"), was made under the title Introduction to the Enemy.

The moving film, demonized at the time, was never released and only got shown at some university campuses. Screened again in Vienna, it revealed that, despite rumours to the contrary, the journey was far from being an ego trip for Fonda. She listens carefully to what the Vietnamese have to say, sometimes translating from the French, keeping herself very much in the background. But she was reviled by conservatives and called "Hanoi Jane." Especially shocking to many was the photograph circulated of Fonda sitting smiling on a Vietcong anti-aircraft tank, something which she apologized for many years later. As late as 1984, protesters picketed a department store in Chicago when she appeared there to promote a new line in exercise clothing.

In Paris, her political instincts drew her to the radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard for whom she made Tout Va Bien (1972), which co-starred her with the then-Communist sympathising French singer and actor Yves Montand. Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who founded the Dziga Vertov Group in 1968 as a Marxist alternative to commercial cinema, made Letter to Jane (1972), a 52-minute film, in which the two directors discuss, in terms of what could be called applied semiology, a photograph of Fonda talking to a North Vietnamese soldier. They ask how we can assess a Vietnamese who is subject to the war daily and an American star, who is deeply concerned and has come to support him. How can reality and symbol co-exist? "Is it the film star who is making history or the people?"

It was only in the late 70s that Jane Fonda was able to paddle in the mainstream again when America was falling victim to a kind of collective amnesia. Few of her later movies echoed her social concerns, though she said, "I believe it's important to make responsible films," at the time of The China Syndrome (1979) - concerning the danger of a meltdown at a nuclear plant - presciently made just before the near meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Although her image gradually mellowed, she still spoke up on women's issues. In a speech about patriarchy given at the National Women's Leadership Summit in Washington DC in June 2003, Fonda said: "It is altogether possible that we are on the verge of a tectonic shift in paradigms - that what we are seeing happening today are the paroxyisms, the final terrible death throes of the old, no longer workable, no longer justifiable system... It's patriarchy's third act and we have to make sure it is its last."

However, many have seen her embracing of capitalism (her fitness empire is worth millions of dollars, and her marriage to media mogul Ted Turner, from whom she separated) as a sign of hypocrisy and/or betrayal. Nevertheless, her melding of a political consciousness with an acting career has been hugely influential. It was heartening in Vienna, as she fulminated against the war in Iraq, to see that she had lost none of her political passion on reaching the age of 70.

- Ronald Bergan

Congrats in the German-language papers: Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Rita Neubauer in Der Tagesspiegel, Susanne Ostwald in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Susan Vahabzadeh in the Süddeutsche Zeitung - and Mariam Schaghaghi talks with Fonda for the Berliner Zeitung.

Online listening tip. Kulturwoche's podcasts are usually in German, but they do have an edition featuring Jane Fonda speaking at the Viennale - in English, of course.

Earlier: David D'Arcy caught FTA last month in Amsterdam.

Posted by dwhudson at December 21, 2007 2:05 AM