Ethan Mordden

"There is one fighter left, Jane Fonda. But some of the causes she fights for are despicable... She has Ingrid Bergman's pioneer work in the star's personal revolution to thank for her rehabilitation as a national heroine after a few years of industry boycott... But Fonda has resisted the film noir legacy that types strong women as cheats, maniacs, killers, and whores--imitation bad men. It is fitting that she gave her finest performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), a Depression-era film of uncompromising social opinion....

"...."Will fortune reward her pluck and spirit?" [emcee] Young asks his audience when Fonda temporarily dances alone... "Will she make it?"

"She can't. She has lost the ability to believe in fairness, charity, and luck. She has lost it because there aren't any.... They Shoot Horses is about the cruelty of capitalism. As the marathon applicants are checked in, aged sailor Red Buttons likens them to cattle on a boat. No, says Fonda--they feed cattle. And there's her face for the first view in the film, angry, hopeless, early old. Buttons comes back, "They kill cattle," and Fonda replies, "That puts them one up on us, doesn't it?" It's a pregnant exchange, for Buttons is virtually slaughtered, exhausted to death; and Fonda really would rather be dead than live so meanly....

"...."Maybe the whole damn world is like Central Casting," she tells us. "They got it all rigged before you even show up."

"Some said the 1969 Oscar contest was rigged so Fonda couldn't win. Her politics were uninformed, strident, and anti-establishment in the extreme. Many assumed that Word had gone out against her before the voting. Any acting citation that passes over a performance of the strength and clarity of Fonda's in They Shoot Horses is hurting itself more than it's hurting Fonda. Still, the winner, Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, gave a competitive performance. Besides, the acting Oscars prefer to go not to unique talents but to dues-paying stars who turn in image-defining portrayals...."

Ethan Mordden, Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (1983), p. 275-77

"....Fonda was criticized for being too resourceful a figure to have sunk to the level of the doomed. She has the power to outlast everybody and win the marathon....

"But isn't it the very point of this work that an economic system of such asymmetrical breadth that some have more than enough and some have nothing oppresses the nothings so fiercely that even the most reliant spirit will shatter? It is Bonnie Bedelia who shyly toots her way through "The Best Things in Life Are Free," then dives for the pennies the audience tosses. That's one picture. That's sympathetic, pitiable. But Fonda, ice and fire that she is, begging Sarrazin to kill her because the misery is unbearable is another picture. That's terrifying."

Mordden, Medium Cool (19  ), p. 277-78.