One of the best interviews of Fonda I've seen by one of the best interviewers that ever lived (he let the interviewees speak without interrupting them). Fonda is in fine form here.
@@WhataboutTRUTH Homo Sapiens evolved from chimpanzees and lived together, in Africa originally, in small groups of about a hundred or so. Humans have an innate primal instinct of xenophobia that causes mistrust of any other humans outside of the group. This makes sense. These small groups would have been tightly bonded and everyone knew everybody else and trust was paramount. This size of group is perhaps the upper limit of what human beings can tolerate in terms of recognition and the ability to bond with. Hate is a by-product of people living in much larger groups and allowing the politics of divide and rule to get a foothold.
I didn't even know of this guy's existence until about 2 months ago when I accidentally watched 12 Angry Men on television which might just be the greatest movie I have ever seen. A true legend he is.
You're lucky, so many great movies with Henry Fonda to discover :You only live once, The Grapes of wrath, The Oxbow Incident, The Lady Eve, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Tin Star, Warlock, Advice and Consent, The Best Man, Fail-Safe, The Spencer's Mountain, Madigan, The Boston Strangler, Once upon a time in the West, There was a crooked man, Sometimes a great notion, My name is Nobody, On golden pond...
The star of the greatest film ever made "12 Angry Men". His screen presence is just astonishing. He draws you in and you pay attention to his every move. Yet his graciousness pervades as his co-stars go about their business with such effective ease that you wonder whether you are watching a documentary or a tightly scripted play. There are not many of his equal, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando perhaps, Nickelson, Hackman or De Niro even. But have any surpassed his achievements?
This was a really wonderful interview, that only Michael Parkinson could have pulled off. I was quite surprised that Mr. Fonda could be not only warm but rather humorous too. I wish they would post all of Michael Parkinson's interviews.
Great post! Just finished reading Hank and Jim Scott Eyman's book. To my surprise (and delight) Henry Fonda was quite talkative and revealing here - I will have to check out other interviews for comparison.
Fabulous interview. I could listen to him all. And that reaction to his reveal in Once Upon A Time In the West in still the same today as it was back then
I remember seeing Once Upon a Time in the West, the movie house was full. That openimg scene for that time was extremely brutal and bloody....Then the camera pans up &you saw Henry Fonda, practically everyone shrieked out, Oh my God Henry Fonda!! Well after that everyone was totally transfixed!
Jane looks so much like her father (and her mother! who was quite brilliant and beautiful.) The talent and intelligence ran and runs beautifully in that family.
I saw so many of his films and a great voice. On Golden Pond had a lot to do with his strained relationship with Jane. He was not the amazing father he portrays here . He was very much like Bing Crosby, although Crosby was likely far worse. Both have smooth, delightful voices which allowed them to hide behind when called out for their b.s. Also, both excellent story tellers. Jimmy Stewart was not the only one that could embellish the truth. Stewart was also a real gem of an actor. So glad I grew up watching these icons live and in person.
@@politicsuncensored5617 I do remember a lot of her antics, too. In the 60s and 70s +. I really don't think that was a very happy family, all the way around. Also, Hollywood at that time and even now, how can anyone survive that and keep their head on straight.
Had no idea a Lynchings ever happend in Omaha NE in 1919 He speaks about it at 15:32 interview. He mentions that republican reactionary types were the kind of people who were in the mob.
Look up the lynching of Will Brown. It's very upsetting that he underplays the total mob that was at that lynching. It's shows how the violence was traumatizing yet normalized which is all the more horrific. We think 1919 was long ago but it was not at all. Just two lifetimes ago, really. He has it only as a memory and the history of that total mob is a blur to a kid's mind. It was not good that his father never fully told him why but at least he fought in his art against reactionary violence for the rest of his life.
Love this interview although Parkinson does not do the James Stewart jokes. I met Fonda or rather Fonda asked to meet me 10 years earlier at the premiere `2001` before Kubrick cut 45 mins. I can still remember how attractive he was and this was 10 years before this interview in wbich he appears Super Cool! `Mike` (Oh My God) (when I referred to `Bill` Nighy as `Bill` and not `William` he bit my head off) Parkinson can do some very good work when he`s not being obsessive and/or bitchy.
In his autobiography Peter Fonda absolutely trashed his father, Henry Fonda, and his father's morals and ethics. He has zero positive words to say about the man. Also, I found Peter Fonda, based on his own autobiography, to be one of the most entitled, egocentric, hypocritical and worthless humans I've ever read about.
Indicative of the time of this interview that he decides to gratuitously characterize the lynch mob as all radical republicans when he has no idea of what, if any, party they represented. Times haven’t changed very much.
guess you missed the bit when he said that most of the people in his hometown were radical republicans, and still are (by 1975). pretty likely that the mob would be made up of these people.
Hummm the lynch mob back in the 1860's would have been the southern democrats, not radical republicans. Even in the 1900's through the 1960's in the south it was democrats that ran the south and lynched blacks, plus anyone that supported them if they got in the way. If it had not been for the Republican party in the 1960's, President Lyndon Johnson would never have gotten his "Civil Rights" bill passed in congress. Because his own party objected greatly and that is a fact of American history. Hanging of a person has never been limited to just republicans or democrats. No race that I know of is pure as ivory snow either. Shalom
Good actor but too far left; not unusual. I grew up two blocks from the Omaha Playhouse where he got his start and there was no Republican reactionary tilt that I could ever discern. The two parties were about evenly split and you avoided heavy partisanship lest you fall out with people you've known ever since you were small children. The often radical left Fondas, their acting prowess notwithstanding, brought a tinge of shame to Omaha. Is he unaware that the greatest abuses of slavery, the fiercest opposition to voting rights for blacks and the organized blocking of school desegregation took place in a region so dominated by the Democrat party that it was known as the Solid South; as in almost always and for a very long time no Republican could be elected? Then too the man who abolished slavery in America, Mr. Lincoln, was a Republican. In my view the Fondas were daft about politics.
Hmmm the biggest shame brought to Omaha was the lynching of Will Brown. Hopefully, Omaha has changed and learned quite a bit since 1919. He was speaking of what the Republicans turned into by 1974 which was deeply racist and wholly reactionary. Historically, he is on point. Lincoln, the Whigs, the Republicans are far more complex than one view or another despite Lincoln being labled "the Great Emancipator." There was far more involved. The bigger issue was what happened during Reconstruction. And then what happened after Brown vs. the Board of Education when there was a split between Republican and Democratic support. Nixon used his "Southern Strategy" to trigger racist Democrats to get on board with his very conservative mistakes in Vietnam and what we're reeling from now with China. The parties were far more complex in the early twentieth century from issues revolving around labor and war. Nixon used overt racist reactions to integration to form a far more conservative Republican party. By the time of this interview, Watergate had been over for months but the country was reeling from that trauma and conservatives started taking sides and talking revenge, even though it was Nixon's (and his enablers) bad acts that that gave the profile of formerly decent Republicans the reputation of the angry, reactionary lynch mob. That mob in 1919 destroyed much of downtown Omaha, almost lynched the mayor and shot, hung and burned the body of a working Omaha man who was only thought guilty of rape because he was convenient to chase. That mob desecrated a man without trial. And that is much of the policy that has been pushing Republican policy of the last 50 years as our basic rights are deteriorating, wars never stop, and violence takes over the capitol. The Fondas were on point because they saw it from the inside and seeing what the powerful can do to manipulate the public into a frenzied mob without due process.
There's ample room for your perception of how parties change. They don't always mean the same thing; they shift but including any influence the tragically flawed Nixon may have had in the same breath with what had happened in Omaha in 1919 is a leap too far. For Fonda to base his philosophical bedrock view on that without taking into account or even bothering to mention is the kind of thing I have come to expect from otherwise exceptionally gifted people. Were the Fondas on point when in July of 1972 Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, posed for the world press on top of an anti-aircraft gun whose sole purpose was to kill Americans? She later expressed regret but the image lives on. Was Peter Fonda on point when in June of 2018 he said "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles"? If Henry was indelibly marked so was I by the horror of that statement.The left has every malady that has ever afflicted the Republicans but in my view they go one step further in embracing the age old lie that the end justifies the means. The image of good old Democrat boy Bull Conner and his dog tearing up a black man is not the kind of thing Democrats are likely to include when they express their loathing of Republicans. The Fondas were unbalanced. The Omaha I grew up in taught me that it's wise to remember that honorable people can have an honest difference of opinion.
Jane has repeatedly apologized for her naivete but rightly was on point that the war was wrong. Both Westmoreland and Macnamara ended up agreeing it was a terrible mistake and probably should have joined her earlier before millions of lives were lost, villages destroyed, unnecessary migration and suffering started and our economy never recovered after a decade of a big mistake. That's where the outrage should lie, not with Fonda.
@@gnolan4281 Also, Bull Connor was a Democrat because he was pro-union but he was only for unions for whites. He didn't see anyone but whites as full human as was taught to him in the segregated south. He was willing to defend that with death and violence that was reactionary as the mob in 1919. He also decried anyone involved with Civil Rights as "Communist." That parlayed well into Nixon's heavy associations with McCarthy. Nixon played a lot of that down after he lost to JFK.
His icecold eyes in the Serge Leone movie with Bronson will be unforgotten for centuries to come. One of the best actors ever.
One of the best interviews of Fonda I've seen by one of the best interviewers that ever lived (he let the interviewees speak without interrupting them). Fonda is in fine form here.
He's a class act with how he addressed the controversy surrounding him and his children. Nothing but praise for them
I noticed too. It puts the lie to the notion that he was a cold, distant parent. In the interview he couldn't praise them highly enough.
"You have to be taught to hate - and you can also be taught you don't have to hate." Profoundly true statement
Yet his daughter was full of hate ,old Liberal fart
@@WhataboutTRUTH
Homo Sapiens evolved from chimpanzees and lived together, in Africa originally, in small groups of about a hundred or so. Humans have an innate primal instinct of xenophobia that causes mistrust of any other humans outside of the group. This makes sense. These small groups would have been tightly bonded and everyone knew everybody else and trust was paramount. This size of group is perhaps the upper limit of what human beings can tolerate in terms of recognition and the ability to bond with.
Hate is a by-product of people living in much larger groups and allowing the politics of divide and rule to get a foothold.
@@WhataboutTRUTH)
@@WhataboutTRUTH OF COURSE, you are correct! Sadly, there will always be apes such as @iamreg1965 that may never learn the Truth.
I didn't even know of this guy's existence until about 2 months ago when I accidentally watched 12 Angry Men on television which might just be the greatest movie I have ever seen. A true legend he is.
You're lucky, so many great movies with Henry Fonda to discover :You only live once, The Grapes of wrath, The Oxbow Incident, The Lady Eve, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Tin Star, Warlock, Advice and Consent, The Best Man, Fail-Safe, The Spencer's Mountain, Madigan, The Boston Strangler, Once upon a time in the West, There was a crooked man, Sometimes a great notion, My name is Nobody, On golden pond...
Henry Fonda: Class act!
And thanks to M. Parkinson for this wonderful interview.
A great actor and a true human being.
a legend
The star of the greatest film ever made "12 Angry Men". His screen presence is just astonishing. He draws you in and you pay attention to his every move. Yet his graciousness pervades as his co-stars go about their business with such effective ease that you wonder whether you are watching a documentary or a tightly scripted play.
There are not many of his equal, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando perhaps, Nickelson, Hackman or De Niro even. But have any surpassed his achievements?
He was a great actor.
This was a really wonderful interview, that only Michael Parkinson could have pulled off. I was quite surprised that Mr. Fonda could be not only warm but rather humorous too.
I wish they would post all of Michael Parkinson's interviews.
Especially his rare interview with James Cagney in 1981...
Henry Fonda was not only a brilliant actor, but also a great story teller.
Superb interview.
Great interview!!
A wonderfully kind and intelligent human being. Truly one of the greats.
Great post! Just finished reading Hank and Jim Scott Eyman's book. To my surprise (and delight) Henry Fonda was quite talkative and revealing here - I will have to check out other interviews for comparison.
Fonda's artwork was exceptionally refined also...
I grew up watching this guy; never realized how centered he was. Like him even more...
He looked terrific for 70.
His greatest roles were with John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine.
Thank you Mr Fonda for your humaneness !!!
He had a great voice.
I think of him in the grapes of wrath. Wonderful.
the man to nice for words and marlous actor i love to have met him
What a coincidence that Marlon Brando's mother is the one who introduced Henry Fonda to acting.
Fabulous interview. I could listen to him all. And that reaction to his reveal in Once Upon A Time In the West in still the same today as it was back then
He died on the 12 August 1982 at age 77
P
I remember seeing Once Upon a Time in the West, the movie house was full. That openimg scene for that time was extremely brutal and bloody....Then the camera pans up &you saw Henry Fonda, practically everyone shrieked out, Oh my God Henry Fonda!! Well after that everyone was totally transfixed!
12 Angry Men stands up today, brilliant film
The long lost days where chat show hosts allowed the guest to speak!
Great actor sadly missed
Henry Fonda died on the 12 August 1982 at age 77
Class act great guy who I would like to have met
@24:38. Rodd Redwing is the man he is referring to, he was Hollywood's main teacher of the quick draw.
Henry Fonda was great as Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Cast against type he played a pretty good villain.
His friend that told him to work with Leone is Eli Wallach
Once Upon A Time In The West.!!!
He mostly played good guys but my favourite was when he played the bad guy in Once Upon A Time In The West.
Loved him and Katherine Hepburn in "On golden pond"
Parkinson was the greatest chat show host.
Why?
He let the guests do the talking and asked grown up questions.
Why can't this interview be saved????
Looks so much like Jane
Jane looks so much like her father (and her mother! who was quite brilliant and beautiful.) The talent and intelligence ran and runs beautifully in that family.
my grandfather was his age and he was a storyteller...thats what they did back then
I saw so many of his films and a great voice. On Golden Pond had a lot to do with his strained relationship with Jane. He was not the amazing father
he portrays here .
He was very much like Bing Crosby, although Crosby was likely far worse. Both have smooth, delightful voices which allowed them to hide behind when called out for their b.s.
Also, both excellent story tellers. Jimmy Stewart was not the only one that could embellish the truth. Stewart was also a real gem of an actor.
So glad I grew up watching these icons live and in person.
Jane was no sweet angel herself & I feel sorry for any man that has a daughter like her. Shalom
@@politicsuncensored5617
I do remember a lot of her antics, too. In the 60s and 70s +. I really don't think that was a very happy family, all the way around. Also, Hollywood at that time and even now, how can anyone survive that and keep their head on straight.
Jane IS no sweet angel. Seems she's not learned yet but there is still time.
His father took him to a lynching. I was really shocked. Also Parkinson is a really good interviewer. They open up to him.
Fascinating interview. Parky at his very best.
He came from an era when men were men.
So that means abandon you're family to play the big hot shot on screen? Wel you are prob. a American 💩💩💩💩
Had no idea a Lynchings ever happend in Omaha NE in 1919 He speaks about it at 15:32 interview. He mentions that republican reactionary types were the kind of people who were in the mob.
Henry Fonda died on the 12 August 1982 at age 77
Look up the lynching of Will Brown. It's very upsetting that he underplays the total mob that was at that lynching. It's shows how the violence was traumatizing yet normalized which is all the more horrific. We think 1919 was long ago but it was not at all. Just two lifetimes ago, really. He has it only as a memory and the history of that total mob is a blur to a kid's mind. It was not good that his father never fully told him why but at least he fought in his art against reactionary violence for the rest of his life.
Love this interview although Parkinson does not do the James Stewart jokes. I met Fonda or rather Fonda asked to meet me 10 years earlier at the premiere `2001` before Kubrick cut 45 mins. I can still remember how attractive he was and this was 10 years before this interview in wbich he appears Super Cool! `Mike` (Oh My God) (when I referred to `Bill` Nighy as `Bill` and not `William` he bit my head off) Parkinson can do some very good work when he`s not being obsessive and/or bitchy.
What kind of clown music are they playing?
He doesn't actually look 70. I'd take him for 62.
In his autobiography Peter Fonda absolutely trashed his father, Henry Fonda, and his father's morals and ethics.
He has zero positive words to say about the man.
Also, I found Peter Fonda, based on his own autobiography, to be one of the most entitled, egocentric, hypocritical and worthless humans I've ever read about.
we must have read different books by peter fonda. different take on it completely
Another Karen Dingleberry Up voting (her own) silly comment Laughable ~ 𝘽𝙊𝙄𝙉𝙆 𝙔𝙖 𝙎𝘾𝙃𝙈𝙐𝘾𝙆~! 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗺
his eyes do not look blue here to me
Indicative of the time of this interview that he decides to gratuitously characterize the lynch mob as all radical republicans when he has no idea of what, if any, party they represented.
Times haven’t changed very much.
guess you missed the bit when he said that most of the people in his hometown were radical republicans, and still are (by 1975). pretty likely that the mob would be made up of these people.
Hummm the lynch mob back in the 1860's would have been the southern democrats, not radical republicans. Even in the 1900's through the 1960's in the south it was democrats that ran the south and lynched blacks, plus anyone that supported them if they got in the way. If it had not been for the Republican party in the 1960's, President Lyndon Johnson would never have gotten his "Civil Rights" bill passed in congress. Because his own party objected greatly and that is a fact of American history. Hanging of a person has never been limited to just republicans or democrats. No race that I know of is pure as ivory snow either. Shalom
Good actor but too far left; not unusual. I grew up two blocks from the Omaha Playhouse where he got his start and there was no Republican reactionary tilt that I could ever discern. The two parties were about evenly split and you avoided heavy partisanship lest you fall out with people you've known ever since you were small children. The often radical left Fondas, their acting prowess notwithstanding, brought a tinge of shame to Omaha.
Is he unaware that the greatest abuses of slavery, the fiercest opposition to voting rights for blacks and the organized blocking of school desegregation took place in a region so dominated by the Democrat party that it was known as the Solid South; as in almost always and for a very long time no Republican could be elected? Then too the man who abolished slavery in America, Mr. Lincoln, was a Republican. In my view the Fondas were daft about politics.
Hmmm the biggest shame brought to Omaha was the lynching of Will Brown.
Hopefully, Omaha has changed and learned quite a bit since 1919.
He was speaking of what the Republicans turned into by 1974 which was deeply racist and wholly reactionary.
Historically, he is on point. Lincoln, the Whigs, the Republicans are far more complex than one view or another despite Lincoln being labled "the Great Emancipator." There was far more involved. The bigger issue was what happened during Reconstruction.
And then what happened after Brown vs. the Board of Education when there was a split between Republican and Democratic support. Nixon used his "Southern Strategy" to trigger racist Democrats to get on board with his very conservative mistakes in Vietnam and what we're reeling from now with China. The parties were far more complex in the early twentieth century from issues revolving around labor and war. Nixon used overt racist reactions to integration to form a far more conservative Republican party. By the time of this interview, Watergate had been over for months but the country was reeling from that trauma and conservatives started taking sides and talking revenge, even though it was Nixon's (and his enablers) bad acts that that gave the profile of formerly decent Republicans the reputation of the angry, reactionary lynch mob. That mob in 1919 destroyed much of downtown Omaha, almost lynched the mayor and shot, hung and burned the body of a working Omaha man who was only thought guilty of rape because he was convenient to chase. That mob desecrated a man without trial. And that is much of the policy that has been pushing Republican policy of the last 50 years as our basic rights are deteriorating, wars never stop, and violence takes over the capitol. The Fondas were on point because they saw it from the inside and seeing what the powerful can do to manipulate the public into a frenzied mob without due process.
There's ample room for your perception of how parties change. They don't always mean the same thing; they shift but including any influence the tragically flawed Nixon may have had in the same breath with what had happened in Omaha in 1919 is a leap too far. For Fonda to base his philosophical bedrock view on that without taking into account or even bothering to mention is the kind of thing I have come to expect from otherwise exceptionally gifted people.
Were the Fondas on point when in July of 1972 Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, posed for the world press on top of an anti-aircraft gun whose sole purpose was to kill Americans? She later expressed regret but the image lives on. Was Peter Fonda on point when in June of 2018 he said "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles"? If Henry was indelibly marked so was I by the horror of that statement.The left has every malady that has ever afflicted the Republicans but in my view they go one step further in embracing the age old lie that the end justifies the means. The image of good old Democrat boy Bull Conner and his dog tearing up a black man is not the kind of thing Democrats are likely to include when they express their loathing of Republicans. The Fondas were unbalanced.
The Omaha I grew up in taught me that it's wise to remember that honorable people can have an honest difference of opinion.
Jane has repeatedly apologized for her naivete but rightly was on point that the war was wrong. Both Westmoreland and Macnamara ended up agreeing it was a terrible mistake and probably should have joined her earlier before millions of lives were lost, villages destroyed, unnecessary migration and suffering started and our economy never recovered after a decade of a big mistake. That's where the outrage should lie, not with Fonda.
@@gnolan4281 Also, Bull Connor was a Democrat because he was pro-union but he was only for unions for whites. He didn't see anyone but whites as full human as was taught to him in the segregated south. He was willing to defend that with death and violence that was reactionary as the mob in 1919. He also decried anyone involved with Civil Rights as "Communist." That parlayed well into Nixon's heavy associations with McCarthy. Nixon played a lot of that down after he lost to JFK.
@gnolan Fair points.
Always interesting to hear Hank. Save for the race story that seems entirely out of place.