The director himself starred as a cowboy drifter, but he remained off camera for his second feature, Idaho Transfer (1973). In the one episode directed by Roger Vadim, a frisson was caused by the casting of Fonda as the lover of a character played by his sister Jane (Vadim’s wife at the time).įonda had three tries at directing features, the first being The Hired Hand (1971), a slow, hippy western, which has a masochistic death-of-the-hero ending popularised by Easy Rider. One exception was Spirits of the Dead (1968), three episodes based on the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The Hired Hand, 1971, which Peter Fonda both directed and starred in, as a cowboy drifter. The film provided plenty of high-speed chases and crashes, as did Race With the Devil (1975), in which Fonda flees after coming across satanic rituals in Texas. In Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), he is on the lam in a souped-up car after stealing cash from a supermarket. Tall, thin and cool in black leathers and shades, and wearing a jacket which bore a large American flag across the back, Fonda’s Captain America became an icon of martyrdom.įrom then on, Fonda’s career took an uncertain turn, lurching from one Easy Rider rip-off to another. Stupidity, corruption and violence are set against the potential freedom of America that Fonda and Hopper represent. The odyssey ends when the two are shot down by a truck driver who despises their iconoclastic lifestyle. The counterculture hit followed two hippies (Hopper and Fonda), who hit the road on motorcycles “in search of the real America” but instead find hostility from small-town bigots. Hopper’s first feature as director, and Fonda’s as producer, was made for $400,000, and took more than $16m at the box office, which rose to more than $60m worldwide in the next three years. ![]() It was during a publicity tour for The Trip, after smoking some grass and drinking some beer in his Toronto hotel room, that he claimed, “I understood immediately just what kind of motorcycle, sex, and drug movie I should make next.” Fonda and Hopper then conceived, wrote (with Terry Southern, the three gaining an Oscar nomination), raised the finance for, and starred in Easy Rider. ![]() The Trip, which was written by Jack Nicholson, also featured Dennis Hopper as an acidhead. He plays a confused TV commercial director who takes his first “trip” on LSD, and experiences visions of sex, death, strobe lights, dancing girls, witches, hooded riders and a torture chamber. Following the success of Wild Angels, Fonda starred in Corman’s The Trip (1967), shot, according to the posters, in “psychedelic colour”. However, at that stage, Fonda knew where he was going. Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra in The Wild Angels, 1966. At the end, when the cops come to arrest some of the gang, his girlfriend ( Nancy Sinatra) begs him to leave. And that’s what we are gonna do…” (The line was sampled at the start of the 1990 Primal Scream hit Loaded). We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man! … And we wanna get loaded. Fonda starred as Heavenly Blues, a sulky, long-haired, leather-clad Hell’s Angels leader, who announces: “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. In a time of counterculture, when standard Hollywood output was found wanting, Fonda turned away from his father’s sphere of influence by going to Roger Corman’s independent setup for this hit biker picture. In 1966, The Wild Angels provided a complete change of image for the young star. ![]() In the same year, in Carl Foreman’s almost three-hour second world war drama The Victors, which follows a squad of American soldiers in Europe, Fonda is a new recruit who has to watch meekly as some nasty GIs have themselves a little fun testing their prowess as marksmen on a small dog he has adopted.īut it was in his third feature, Lilith (1964), Robert Rossen’s strange and intelligent study of schizophrenia, in which he played a vulnerable, bookish, love-stricken mental health patient who veers between violent outbursts and extreme calm, that he first had the chance to prove that there was another Fonda around to be reckoned with. ![]() The rangy, goodlooking Fonda, who had something of the laidback, physical grace of his father, made a pleasant enough Hollywood debut in 1963 as the romantic lead, opposite the vibrant teen star Sandra Dee, in Tammy and the Doctor (1963). Photograph: Allstar/UNIVERSAL/Sportsphoto Ltd.Īlthough being his father’s son became as much of a blessing as a curse, initially it was no drawback. Peter Fonda and Sandra Dee in Tammy and the Doctor, 1963.
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