One Angry Man, One VERY Angry Man

Henry Fonda obviously had a lot of great roles throughout his career; as the conscience-driven President in "Fail Safe", as the gallant, albeit ultimately doomed, Preston Dillard, in "Jezebel", as the ordinary trouble-shooter/hero in "12 Angry Men", as the legendary (almost mythical), Tom Joad, in "The Grapes of Wrath", as Norman Thayer (his Oscar Winning performance from "On Golden Pond"), as Abraham Lincoln in "Young Mr. Lincoln", as Gil Carter, the lone man who stands up to the mob in "The Oxbow Incident" and, yes, perhaps most famously as "Mister Roberts"....................................................................................................... But I'm telling you here, people, the one that stands out most to me is the role that he had in Sergio Leone's epic masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time In the West". In this particular movie, folks, Mr. Fonda was offered the counter-casting role of a lifetime. This, in that not only does he get to play the bad guy (one of only 2 or 3 movies in which he was afforded this opportunity), he gets to play about as evil a person as there's ever been on film (I don't even want to talk about some of the crap that this guy does). And, yep/yessiree, Mr. Henry Fonda nails it! In fact, he plays this iron-clad and steely-eyed killer with such a malevolence and bile that we literally almost want to walk out of the room - almost, clearly, the operant word.