Whiteout

     Peter Fonda is dead.  I don't know the details, I just know that I'll never be able to thank him for his performances in Easy Rider and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.  Peter Fonda carried on his father Henry's quiet screen presence.  Henry Fonda, even when he played a sadistic villain like Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West, had about him an air of detachment, passively observing most of the time.  His son had this ability, too.  In Ulee's Gold, made much later than the classic psychedelic era of many of his movies, Fonda played a beekeeper struggling against some, if I recall rightly, big business forces that wanted his land, or something.  I saw the film in the theater, accompanied by my then girlfriend.  An edifying movie, like with any episode of The Waltons where feeling good after the credits is the goal.  There's a shot of Fonda holding up a golden sticky liquid marvel inside a jar, lit dazzlingly in the kind of glowing cinematography used in The Natural to make Glenn Close look desirable.
     My girlfriend and I enjoyed Ulee's Gold, but later I realized the real find in the movie is Patricia Richardson who played Tim Allen's wife in Home Improvement.  A serious dramatic actress on a par with the best, it turns out, Patricia Richardson spent 1991 to 1999 acting the part of mother to three precocious boys, the eldest one a dunce, the middle kid a smartass, the youngest an adorable appendage to the scripts.  I watched this show when it was on in its first run.  I missed probably at least a hundred of the 202 (!) episodes.  Tim Allen, a comedian who's made me laugh occasionally, was stuck to a character for eight years, a role portraying a dumbass-on-purpose.  He huffs like a gorilla when he thinks of manly things to do.  He chats with his genial neighbor over the fence.  For some reason we never see all of Wilson's face.  This actor, Earl Hindman, whose big and small screen career goes back to 1967, starred as "Bruno" in The Ultimate Degenerate (1969).  The film's IMDB synopsis wraps it up for us:
   
     "With the help of an assistant, a psycho drugs, tortures, and photographs women he meets through personal ads to find the ultimate degenerate.  His latest target is a thrill-seeking lesbian."
 
     Yeah, that old story.
     Six Degrees of Separation, the movie-think game applied usually to Kevin Bacon, operates in the above lines that began with Peter Fonda and ended up, connection-wise, chained to The Ultimate Degenerate, starring an actor who became famous for never showing all of his face on a hit 1990's TV show starring an actress who later worked with Peter Fonda in a family-friendly melodrama similar in theme to Mr. Majestyk, minus the violence.
     Eminent domain?  I think that's what Ulee's Gold uses as the McGuffin to get us interested in Peter Fonda's beekeeper character.  Ulee, short for Ulysses.  A practice of a lot of fiction writers (literary and for the screen) is to give a character a weird name.  Dom Toretto, Vin Diesel's role in the Fast and Furious movies, for example.  Michelle Rodriguez plays his girlfriend, Letty.  Letty, not Maria, not Julia, but a shortening of Leticia, a very special name, at least north of Baja California.
     Even Shakespeare got in on this: Hamlet, Macduff, Pistol, Tybalt, Rosencrantz.  If there's someone named Hamlet, there should also be someone named Village.
     I've gone off of Ulee's property since the post's opening.  Fonda was a good, irreplaceable actor.  I miss him already.  He will always be Captain America.

                                                                             Vic Neptune