Henry Fonda earned his first Oscar nomination for his indelible turn as Tom Joad who becomes head of his family of Oklahoma tenant farmers in John Ford’s 1940 masterpiece “The Grapes of Wrath’ based on John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. And 44 years later, his two-time Oscar-winning daughter Jane Fonda had her “Grapes of Wrath” moment in the ABC Mother’s Day movie, “The Dollmaker.”
Based on Harriette Arnow’s 1954 novel of the same name, the three-hour drama set in the final two years of World War II, finds Fonda playing the indomitable Gertie Nevels, a caring, loving and uneducated mother of five. A sharecropper in Kentucky, Gertie dreams of owning her own farm and has saved enough money to buy one. Her husband (Levon Holm) isn’t much of a farmer but is good at fixing machines. When he gets a job as a mechanic at a factory in Detroit, Gertie is pressured to put her dreams on hold and move with her children to Detroit. Gertie and her children are fish out of water in the big city and are treated like dumb hillbillies. A family tragedy nearly destroys her, but she rebounds. Gertie discovers her talent for carving wooden dolls and figurines is the family’s way out of Detroit and back to Kentucky.
And though Gertie is far removed from her roles in such films as “Barbarella,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They,” “Klute,” “Julia” and “Coming Home,” a New York Times piece on “Dollmaker” noted “the character has parallels to some of the other characters Miss Fonda has played before…docile women who undergo a transformation and achieve a measure of independence coupled with new-found self-esteem.”
When the actress had read the novel back in 1971 and vowed that she would play the resilient Gertie one day . “It’s real hard for me to back off from something once I set my mind to it,” Fonda told the New York Times. “Gertie challenged my heart and my mind… I loved Gertie’s courage in the face of bone-and-soul crushing experiences. It’s very rare to find a project that shows a woman doing things women do without condescension or false feminization. “
Fonda never envisioned “The Dollmaker” as TV movie. Though she had great success with Lily Tomlin in Netflix’s 2015-2022 comedy series “Grace and Frankie,” Fonda had a rather snobbish opinion of TV back then. She envisioned “The Dollmaker” as a feature film, but scribes had a difficult time winnowing the 600-page novel down to a two-hour movie. Fonda’s producing partner Bruce Gilbert encouraged her to consider television. After seeing the impact the 1977 miniseries “Roots” had on viewers, she realized “when you do television, you have opportunities that you don’t have anywhere else, and one of them is to reach masses of people.”
They hired the renowned Daniel Petrie (“Eleanor & Franklin,” “Sybil”) to direct and Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn to write the screenplay. Geraldine Page, Amanda Plummer and Ann Hearn rounded out the cast. Once the production was set, Fonda threw herself into becoming Gertie. She spent time living with Appalachian families in Kentucky and Arkansas going so far as chopping wood, milking cows, and churning butter. Because she wasn’t good with accents, Fonda worked with noted dialogue coach Robert Easton. “We went through the entire script phonetically and marked every word. And from the time I got on the plane to location, I spoke in dialect.”
All the work paid off handsomely. Fonda is luminous; she literally becomes Gertie. The New York Times’ critic John O’Connor noted Fonda “may not, at first glance, be people’s idea of a plain and gritty mountain woman” but “she has cleanly prepared strenuously for the role of Gertie, and the result is a performance that is nearly always spellbinding.”
Emmy voters felt the same way. Fonda won outstanding lead actress in a limited series or special. The movie was nominated for a total of six Emmys; besides Fonda, Julie Weiss received the award for her costume design. Petrie won the DGA Award for dramatic special; Cooper and Cronyn won the WGA award for their teleplay, as well as the Humanitas Prize.
And four decades after it aired, “The Dollmaker” is still a transcendent experience.
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