TCM Schedule for Friday, August 13, 2021 -- Summer Under the Stars: Jane Fonda

Today's Star is the Right's favorite Star To Hate - Jane Fonda, or as they would call her, Hanoi Jane. According to her IMDB entry:

Fonda's war protests canceled the impact of her first Oscar for Klute (1971); she was practically blackballed from the film industry until Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) brought her renewed mainstream success. None of the four movies she made in between were widely distributed. As the political climate changed the public backlash of her Hanoi trip died down, and she finished the 1979-1980 season as the top ranking female box office star in the world despite a sub-rosa Hollywood campaign to ruin her respectability and spread false tales about her subversive behavior. One widely circulated fabrication had Fonda destroying the only existing negative of Stagecoach (1939) because she despised John Wayne.

In 1970, she was arrested at Cleveland Airport, Ohio after allegedly kicking patrolman Robert Pieper and customs agent Edward Matuszek in the groin and upper leg during their struggle to detain her upon finding 105 bottles containing some 2,000 capsules in her luggage. The star spent ten hours in a cell at Cuyahoga County Jail and was released on $6,000 personal bond. A federal drug smuggling charge was dropped once the substances were identified as vitamins and prescribed amounts of Dexedrine, Valium and Compazine. For lack of evidence, a federal assault charge pressed by Matuszek was dropped too, since the supposed 'assault' occurred when he chased Fonda into the ladies room. Pieper filed a $100,000 personal injury lawsuit against her in civil court that was eventually dismissed at his attorney's request.

In April 2005, a Vietnam veteran spit tobacco juice in her face after waiting 90 minutes in line to have her sign a copy of her memoir at Unity Temple Bookstore in Kansas City, Missouri. Though it was intended as a spit-and-run, Michael A. Smith, 54, was tackled by security and was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Fonda seemed unrattled and once the tobacco juice was wiped off, she continued to sign books without even getting up from her seat. She declined to press charges.

Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- Tall Story (1960)
1h 31m | Comedy | TV-PG
Love puts a college basketball star into a tailspin.
Director: Joshua Logan
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Ray Walston

This was Jane Fonda's film debut, for which she received star billing. It was also Robert Redford's debut, though he was uncredited.


8:00 AM -- The Chapman Report (1962)
2h 5m | Comedy | TV-PG
A research psychologist gets involved in the personal lives of four women.
Director: George Cukor
Cast: Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda

It is significant, and a bit of a private joke, that Glynis Johns reads a specific Dowson poem because it was from that poem that Margaret Mitchell got the title for "Gone With The Wind" and the director of "The Chapman Report," George Cukor, was the director of Gone with the Wind (1939) before being fired a few weeks into the shoot by producer David O. Selznick.


10:15 AM -- Period of Adjustment (1962)
1h 52m | Comedy | TV-PG
A newlywed couple's honeymoon is disrupted by their friends' marital problems.
Director: George Roy Hill
Cast: Tony Franciosa, Jane Fonda, Jim Hutton

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- George W. Davis, Edward C. Carfagno, Henry Grace and Richard Pefferle

It's been said that Lois Nettleton was playing against type. Her character was supposed to be a "homely" type. However beauty experts (whoever they are) have supposedly said that Lois Nettleton is every bit as beautiful as Jane Fonda. Ms. Nettleton is both an outdoors type beauty (whatever that means) and a Hollywood glamour girl. For this movie, M.G.M. makeup artists put limited makeup and pastel colors on Nettleton to make her look more mousy than flashy; A tribute to Lois Nettleton's chameleon-like ability and acting talent. Facially and physically, Nettleton bears a slight resemblance to Fonda, although Fonda is considered more classically beautiful and innately sexy (in the vein of Marilyn Monroe and her ilk).


12:15 PM -- Any Wednesday (1966)
1h 49m | Comedy | TV-PG
A young businessman catches his boss keeping a mistress in the company apartment.
Director: Robert Ellis Miller
Cast: Jane Fonda, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Jones

The original Broadway production of "Any Wednesday" opened on Feb. 18, 1964 at the Music Box Theater and ran for 983 performances. Rosemary Murphy was nominated for the 1964 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play and recreated her role in the movie version.


2:15 PM -- In the Cool of the Day (1963)
1h 29m | Romance | TV-PG
A man's efforts to save his friend's marriage lead to infidelity.
Director: Robert Stevens
Cast: Jane Fonda, Peter Finch, Angela Lansbury

Jane Fonda said on "Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen" that this was the worst movie of her career. So bad in fact that she wasn't even certain it had been theatrically released, and that she wishes it had never been made.


4:00 PM -- Agnes Of God (1985)
1h 38m | Drama | TV-14
A psychiatrist tries to unravel the case of a young nun discovered with a dead baby.
Director: Norman Jewison
Cast: Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Meg Tilly

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Anne Bancroft, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Meg Tilly, and Best Music, Original Score -- Georges Delerue

The film's aesthetic design was inspired by the work of Dutch Painter Johannes Vermeer (aka Jan Vermeer aka Johan Vermeer). Director Norman Jewison has said of this that "...the basis for the look of Agnes of God (1985) was the work of the Dutch painter Vermeer. When I think of Agnes of God (1985), I think of Vermeer's rich dark tones and the way the light hits the faces and hands in his portraits. That's the look that we were looking for." The real-life character of Vermeer appears in the later picture Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) and is portrayed in that film by English actor Colin Firth.


6:00 PM -- Sunday in New York (1963)
1h 45m | Comedy | TV-PG
A philandering pilot gets real moral, real fast when his sister contemplates a premarital fling.
Director: Peter Tewksbury
Cast: Rod Taylor, Jane Fonda, Cliff Robertson

New York's Rockefeller Center and the famous Prometheus Fountain and Channel Gardens, prominent location setting in the film, is only 30 years old in 1963. Fifth Avenue is still a two way street, on the bus route. Everyone appears well dressed for a Sunday in New York.



WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS -- JANE FONDA



8:00 PM -- The China Syndrome (1979)
2h 2m | Drama | TV-MA
A television newswoman stumbles onto deadly secrets at a nuclear power plant.
Director: James Bridges
Cast: Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Lewis Arquette

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Jack Lemmon, Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Jane Fonda, Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen -- Mike Gray, T.S. Cook and James Bridges, and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- George Jenkins and Arthur Jeph Parker

When the film was first released on 16 March 1979, nuclear power executives soon lambasted the picture as being "sheer fiction" and a "character assassination of an entire industry". Then twelve days after its launch, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.


10:15 PM -- Klute (1971)
1h 54m | Suspense/Mystery | TV-MA
A low-key small town detective journeys to New York City to investigate the murder of a friend.
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Cast: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi

Winner of an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Jane Fonda

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced -- Andy Lewis and David E. Lewis

Bree's apartment was built on a sound stage at a New York film studio where Jane Fonda could spend the night. The director even had a working toilet installed in the bathroom of the set. Jane contributed to decorating the apartment by deciding Bree would be a romance reader and have a cat. Jane remembered an actress from Lee Strasberg's private class that occasionally serviced John F. Kennedy, so she decided Bree had done this as well. A signed photo of Kennedy appears on the fridge in Bree's apartment.


12:30 AM -- Barbarella (1968)
1h 38m | Horror/Science-Fiction | TV-MA
An over-sexed space agent takes on a dictator and an amoral queen.
Director: Roger Vadim
Cast: Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg

The scenes during the opening credits where Barbarella seems to float around her spaceship were filmed by having Jane Fonda lie on a huge piece of Plexiglas with a picture of the spaceship underneath her. It was filmed from above, creating the illusion that she is in zero gravity.


2:15 AM -- Stanley And Iris (1990)
1h 42m | Drama | TV-14
Drama about working women and their lives in a factory, centering around the romance between a baker and an illiterate man.
Director: Martin Ritt
Cast: Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Martha Plimpton

During the filming in Waterbury, Connecticut, local Vietnam veterans picketed the production, protesting Jane Fonda's controversial anti-war activities from nearly two decades prior. After completing this film, Jane Fonda took a fifteen year hiatus from acting until Monster-in-Law (2005).


4:15 AM -- Tout va bien (1972)
1h 35m | Drama | TV-MA
An American news correspondent gets mixed up with a wildcat strike.
Director: Jean-luc Godard
Cast: Jane Fonda, Yves Montand, Vittorio Caprioli

Most of the shots contain all the three colours of the French flag: blue, white and red.