Henry Fonda names his 10 favourite Henry Fonda movies: “Does anybody doubt it?”
Having notched over 100 film and television credits during a legendary career, there are plenty of options on the table for naming the greatest performance ever given by Henry Fonda. However, the actor had his own shortlist of candidates, and some of them wouldn’t necessarily be among the first that come to mind.
Some of his finest work didn’t even come on the screen, either, with Fonda remaining partial to treading the boards from his beginnings onstage in the late 1920s right up until the twilight years of his personal and professional life more than half a century later. Of course, it was cinema that made him a star, and his filmography is overflowing with some of the most indelible features to ever come out of Hollywood.
A close friend of John Wayne and a regular collaborator of John Ford, Fonda travelled in the same circles as many ‘Golden Age’ icons, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to suggest he was a better performer than most of his era. In a time where the distinction between an actor and a movie star was fairly self-explanatory, Fonda regularly gave audiences the best of both worlds.
From the seminal courtroom drama of 12 Angry Men to classic William Wellman western The Ox-Bow Incident and his ongoing partnership with Ford that yielded The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, and Fort Apache via Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and his Academy Award-winning crowning achievement starring alongside daughter Jane in On Golden Pond, Fonda was a force of nature.
Not every one of his projects was guaranteed to be a winner, though, and Fonda wasn’t shy in admitting it. He’d originated the title role and played it thousands of times over the years, but when Mister Roberts made the jump to the big screen, it ended up going down as one of his greatest disappointments.
Still, the good heavily outweighed the bad, but Fonda offered up a somewhat surprising selection of contenders when pressed to name his favourites out of his own back catalogue in a 1964 interview with The New York Times. Even then, he was aware that there was an industry-wide shift coming that would take the art of performance further away from actors than ever before.
“Films are a director’s medium, not an actor’s,” he mused. “Does anybody doubt it?” That said, he was comfortable and confident enough in the work he’d delivered that he was able to focus on himself and share what he believed to be the prime cuts from a filmography that helped make him a legend.
“12 Angry Men, Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr Lincoln, Ox-Bow Incident,” he began, and nobody’s going to argue with that quartet. “I enjoyed doing The Male Animal and The Lady Eve. There was the Ford picture in Mexico, that one with Annabella in England, War and Peace, and my little cameo in The Longest Day.”
Fonda’s “Ford picture in Mexico” was 1947’s drama The Fugitive, and “that one with Annabella” was 1937’s period piece Wings of the Morning. He may not have gone out of his way to name them by title, and they arguably wouldn’t be considered among his very best looking at the competition, but they clearly made an impact on the Oscar winner if they were mentioned in the same breath as some of his unforgettable classics.
Henry Fonda’s favourite movies of his career:
- 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
- The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
- Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)
- The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943)
- The Male Animal (Elliott Nugent, 1942)
- The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
- The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947)
- Wings of the Morning (Harold D Schuster, 1937)
- War and Peace (King Vidor, 1956)
- The Longest Day (Andrew Marton, 1962)
