On Golden Pond burnishes age with the art of Hepburn and Fonda
It begins with images of serenity: wild flowers gently stirring in an almost imperceptible spring breeze; loons, bright-eyed and sleek, afloat on untroubled waters; the lake itself shimmering in the backlight of a dying sun. The first glimpses of Golden Pond are washed with the kind of burnished light that colors our recollections of better places and better times past.
The first glimpses of the aged couple who are reopening their comfortable old summer house are suffused with a similar light, though that is more a trick of the moviegoer's memory than of the cinematographer's art. For Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda arrive in On Golden Pond bearing with them not merely their vacation baggage but a montage of beloved images assembled from a combined 95 years of motion picture acting in 129 features, not to mention uncounted stage and television appearances.
Spunky Kate and Honest Hank! If people were allowed to vote on such matters, the pair would probably be grandparents to an entire nation, since they are among the very few movie stars who have gone on working while four or five movie generations have grown up. By this time, their personal crotchets and graces, the events in the chronicle of their lives, have merged in the public mind with fragments from all those movies. Down the long corridor of the years, it seems we have encountered them at every turning. When they were young they gave lessons in romance; in middle age they taught steadfastness and honor; now it seems not only right but almost inevitable that they should come together—astonishingly—for the first time, to share some of the pains and puzzlements of age with us.
It comes as a gift that the vehicle is literately written by Ernest Thompson and sensitively directed by Mark Rydell. On Golden Pond is a mature movie, and for the first time in years that does not make it an oddity. The youth audience the film industry has been wooing for more than a decade is growing up. According to an industry source, 43% of those Americans who regularly go to movies are now over 29 (only 25% were in that age group eight years ago). Very few major movies aimed at adolescents are being released this holiday season. Instead, the next weeks will offer Ragtime, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's panoramic vision of turn-of-the-century America; Reds, Warren Beatty's life of Revolutionary John Reed; Absence of Malice, a serious examination of journalistic ethics; and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which is about euthanasia. Even the new John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd feature is far from Animal House; it is an adaptation of Thomas Berger's Neighbors, a farcically structured but coruscating novel about friendship. As if to stress the point, such legendary figures as James Cagney and Fred Astaire (see boxes) will be back on-screen before the year turns.