Henry Fonda’s least favourite role was one he knew better than anyone: “We hated the picture”
In theory, an actor should be capable of giving one of the best performances of their career playing a character they know better than anyone else. Unfortunately, when Henry Fonda was forced to cross that bridge, what emerged on the other side was the movie he liked the least out of any he made during a storied career.
The Academy Award, Bafta, Golden Globe, and Tony-winning icon pulled his weight in countless classics spanning decades, sharing the screen with many of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s biggest stars and most indelible legends, many of whom would point to Fonda as being among the most naturally gifted performers in the industry.
A regular collaborator of John Ford, Fonda dominated the screen in a litany of timeless greats, including Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, Young Mr Lincoln, and Fort Apache, as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time the West, and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.
Those were all films he held close to his heart for a variety of reasons, but even the one he despised the most was illustrative of Fonda’s penchant for attaching himself to prestige pictures after it earned an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Picture’ and won his co-star Jack Lemmon the prize for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
1955’s dramedy Mister Roberts originally began life as a Ford flick, but the director ended up being replaced by Mervyn LeRoy midway through production when things grew so fraught behind the scenes he and Fonda came to blows, although that did at least lead the filmmaker directly towards the greatest movie of his career when the unexpected gap in his schedule paved the way for The Searchers.
Mister Roberts was based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Heggen, which gave rise to a stage adaptation that became the talk of Broadway. Fonda played the title character during that lengthy run and won a Tony for his efforts, but he was supremely dissatisfied with what happened to the material when it made the jump from the boards to the big screen.
“When you have done a play like I did Mister Roberts, and I did it for four years, you become a purist of that play,” he explained to Dick Cavett. “Everybody that was part of that play, we hated the picture because it took liberties, the wrong kind of liberties.” Fonda even called the feature an insult to the stage version, one that he’d dedicated years of his life to.
Ironically, Fonda was initially deemed too old to reprise his role in Mister Roberts, and he was only cast because the studio’s top choices had turned it down, and Ford insisted he play the lead. In the end, the director was replaced, and the star called it the worst thing he’d ever made, so neither of them ended up getting what they wanted out of the ordeal.
