Today, we celebrate the birthday of Henry Fonda!

Fonda was born 119 years ago today and, over the course of his long career, he was often cast in role the epitomized everything great about America.  It’s rare to find a Henry Fonda film in which he played an out-and-out villain, though he did just that in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West.  (Leone, in fact, cast Fonda as the evil Frank because he knew audiences would be shocked to see Fonda coldly gunning down settlers and their families.)

One of Fonda’s finest films was 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident, in which he played a cowboy who finds himself drafted into joining a posse that ends up hanging three men for the crime of murder and cattle rustling.  The members of the posse (including seven of whom voted against hanging the men) later learn that the men were innocent.  In today’s scene that I love, Henry Fonda reads aloud the letter that one of the men wrote to his wife shortly before he was hung.  This was one of Fonda’s most heartfelt and powerful performances.