I just watched “On Golden Pond”

Henry Fonda earned that Oscar. I thought it was his best performance.

I like it, in part because my family had a lake cottage in Ontario when I was growing up, and I can very much relate to that aspect of it. In fact, our lake resembled Squam Lake, where it was filmed.

Loons are special. We used to sleep with the windows open and listen to them calling to each other on the lake. It's one of the most evocative sounds of the north.

And the opening music is beautiful.

WHET Doug McKeon?

I saw it in a theater when it came out. Packed house and the audience loved it. Fonda was fantastic and so was Hepburn. Dabney Coleman and the kid, too. Not that impressed with Jane, but she was the one who put it all together and I’m glad she did.

I did have an interest when I was 10. In hot daddy Dabney!

I remember intensely disliking Katharine Hepburn in this film.

But, I was 10.

A big hit when released. Was so glad when it finally came to our little rural movie theater, down the old town road.

Did you pick strawberries on the way?

Hepburn seemed like a real crank in this. I don’t think she was used to playing mothers.

I love the movie and its soundtrack. Saw in 1981 at age 11.

My snooty Honors English teacher rented ‘On Golden Pond’ on VHS as a “reward” for our excellence. Fortunately, the copy was defective, and had to be substituted-hilariously-with ‘Poltergeist’.

Stay out of Purgatory Cove.

I love this movie. I’m from Minnesota, and our family spent two weeks in northern Minnesota every summer in a cabin on a lake.! I loved to listen to the loons! (And I lost a” Walter” that I had on a hook. My brother was pissed!

It was a massive hit with the public in its initial release.

I spent some vacations on a couple of lakes in New Hampshire, though usually at the beach in Maine. The movie captures the aesthetic well. Every lake has a legendary fish no one has caught. I don’t know where Norman was a professor, but that house and boat are pretty big and nice. I think in the play the setting was more modest.

.....

Went to an amazing wedding there 25 years ago. Gorgeous country.

Standwyck should’ve played Ethel.

Ethel Merman should have played Ethel, and had a showstopping dockside number, "The Loons are Back (and so is Mama)!"

Loved the soundtrack as a gayling.

Stanwyck would have been good if the movie was set in Canarsie.

Rose gets on my nerves but the other three consistently crack me up.

You’re my knight in shiny armor.

[quote] "Loved the soundtrack as a gayling."

I love it now, R19. I love the movie and everyone in it. But the opening (and opening theme) is my favorite part of the film. I specifically love the way costume designer Dorothy Jeakins' credit was presented/framed in the sequence @1:50).

As mentioned on the recent "I Love New England" thread: the unused portions of the opening featuring the '73 Oldsmobile Delta 88 were later recycled for the opening of "Newhart".

Other than Spencer Tracy, Fonda is my favorite actor. Peter Bogdanovich said he wanted to make this film with James Stewart. I also love Jimmy but Fonda’s simplicity and depth are so much better for this. Very real.

There's a scene showing a shop front (a fishing establishment, I think) in the movie where a telephone number is quickly displayed on the building in the background. A friend of mine called the number the next day after we saw the movie, and the person who answered confirmed it was their business that showed up in the background!

R25- Was it a 603 area code in New Hampshire??

R26 I’ll let them answer but in the ‘80s a local sign wouldn’t have had an area code with the phone number. You didn’t have to dial area codes locally until the ‘90s, I think.

Hi R26 and R27. I'm R25. We lived in the southwest, so my friend must have either known where the movie was filmed and found the area code. I just checked and the scene comes early in the movie when Norman and Ethel take take their boat over to the store. The phone number is easy to see, sans area code.

As a child I remember thinking Jane Fonda wore a lot of makeup in this.

I really didn't care for the movie. I saw the stage production with Julie Harris and Charles Durning in Los Angeles a year before the film version and liked it better.

Remember when Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews did a live TV production in spring 2001?

Also co-starred Glenne Headly and Sam Robards.

I won my *4th* Oscar for this film, bitches!

I beat out Meryl "you can see the wheels turning" Streep!

Can you imagine a movie like this being the #2 movie of the year nowadays?

I thought it was just a collection of overwrought scenes to be submitted for your Oscar consideration.

[quote]I thought it was just a collection of overwrought scenes to be submitted for your Oscar consideration.

😂😂😂

R17, STANWYCK

R31 It was “quickly forgotten” with good reason.

Love this clip when the audience cries out in shock as Kate wins her unprecedented fourth Oscar.

Thank you r38. Loved that.

Meryl Streep looked so stunning. Funny seeing how different the actresses looked back then. Much more natural.

Every copy of that insipid pond movie should be burned and deleted for the term "suck face" alone.

R38 you’re welcome. Interestingly enough this year they ceased showing the boxes of all the nominees on camera as the winners name is read. May have had some to do with not as many nominees in the acting categories showing up.

OGP inspired one of Kael's better take-downs, including this evaluation of the Hepburn-Fonda (characters') relationship: "That's not a mother talking -- it's a headmistress."

Kael had a way of making you see things her way, or seeing things in an alternate way, which made her an interesting critic, but her perceptions often seemed exaggerated. Sure Hepburn sounded like that, because she often did, it was her nature, but why can’t a mother sound like that, in certain situations? Pauline was a spoiler.

I saw it at age nine with my mother and grandmother in one of our town's two dinky theaters.

[quote]OGP inspired one of Kael's better take-downs, including this evaluation of the Hepburn-Fonda (characters') relationship: "That's not a mother talking -- it's a headmistress."

Headmistress?

Honey, you're living in a dream world.

No matter what they say, they never leave their wives.

Jane at her most unbearably earnest in this. Also, Hepburn doesn't read as Jane's mother in this, but rather a friendly female mentor.

Perfect, OP. I was just casting around for something and this will do nicely.

I don’t know why people (here, anyway) are always down on Hepburn in this role. You need a strong older actress who’s Fonda’s equal in screen presence, she’s exactly the New England type who seems like she could actually have spent her summers In that cabin. If anything, Jane is the one who seems out of place. Good thing she’s actually the daughter of one of them and looks like him, which makes her more believable at this time when she had the Jane Fonda Workout body and seems like a California girl who never spent a day on Golden Pond in her life.

We just don’t like mannered Hepburn in anything, R48.

R49 Haha, well, actually Davis afaik always said good things about Hepburn. Otoh when Cavett tried to draw Hepburn out on Davis quickly said something like, “Yes, she’s awfully good” like she didn’t especially mean it.

The mother should have been played by Lucille Ball.

What the fuck does that have to do with what WE think of Hepburn, R50?

Of all the movies you could have chosen you picked that shit?!!

R53, I was inspired by the “I love New England” thread.

[quote]Did you pick strawberries on the way?

Oodles and oodles of them, R7. Along the old town road.

You, fucktard.

I just watched paint dry

R52 The post I answered, post R49, was signed “Bette Davis.”

I just pissed in a pond

The best thing about "On Golden Pond" was playwright, Ernest Thompson, posing sexy for interviews.

A few years ago, he was still trying to make a career out of it.

If you have a one-track mind...

Wow, WMUR just brought back some memories. When we had an antenna we got that station - and later on cable, along with the PBS station from NH, which I loved. Nowwe don’t get any of it (in the Boston area).

It seemed strange to me that the lake in the movie would be called a pond. And also that the daughter would be named Chelsea. Was there any reason given for that? It wasn’t the kind of name I thought Norman and Ethel wold name a daughter born in the late 40’s or whatever.

R57 = new to Datalounge

You old poop.

Katherine and Jane had zero mother/daughter chemistry. I don't know if it's because Katherine had nothing to draw on from experience as a mother or that Jane had nothing to draw on as a daughter (she lost her mother very early), but it was like watching two heavily emoting stumps trying to embrace.

R51. Well, Lucy WAS offered the part...

It was no The Four Seasons.

if only Bea Arthur had been a little older, she would have played that part.

I was still in high school when this film came out and I had no interest in seeing it and still don't. Even the trailer makes it look awful. I did however see The Elephant Man and Ordinary People around the same time and liked both of them. It currently has an unimpressive 68 Metascore on IMDB

Time Out Two of Hollywood's best-loved veterans deserved a far better swan song than this sticky confection.

The New Yorker Pauline Kael The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

Chicago Reader Dave Kehr The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

Time Out- Two of Hollywood's best-loved veterans deserved a far better swan song than this sticky confection.

The New Yorker Pauline Kael-The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

Chicago Reader Dave Kehr-The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

The movie's two Chris Craft boats are on display at Katz's Marina on Lake Hopatcong, NJ.

My mother loved it and tried to make my father watch it when it came on cable. He quickly found something else to do.

As a kid I thought it was boring. As an adult, I appreciate the actors and love the cinematography, but it’s not anything I want to watch repeatedly.

I think my mom missed New England. We were stuck in Clarksville, TN and she couldn’t stand it.

[quote]We were stuck in Clarksville, TN and she couldn’t stand it.

No, no, no, no!

And I don't know if I'm ever coming home...

R72 I’ll meet you at the station.

Yeah, I love the Monkees.

Hepburn is not motherly at all and the scenes with Jane don't quite connect. But the father-daughter stuff is just dynamite.

Three huge stars. Star power mattered back then.

OP!

Please STFU, & watch it again, right before you’re about to die.

Jesus Christ Keaton's hair in R38's clip.

Squam Lake is beautiful, I've hiked around there many times.

R21 who is Rose?

[quote]Can you imagine a movie like this being the #2 movie of the year nowadays?

It would've been the #1 film of 1981 if not for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

It even beat SUPERMAN II, which came in at #3.

Jane Fonda was the original MILF.

I love this movie. It came on HBO all the time when I was growing up. It was one of the rare films that I could talk about with my grandmother, a Lutheran minister's wife.

"a doddering valentine" lol.

I saw it when it came out and thought it was nothing special until I learned some old, nasty, racist cranks in my extended family thought it was the best movie ever made then I hated it.

Shit that makes you feel old. Doug McKeon will be 59 on June 10. He is about 15 years older than Jane Fonda was at the time of the filming.

There's nothing racist about ON GOLDEN POND.

Just a lot of cussing, including from the teenage boy, which I remember my grandmother did not appreciate.

R76: "Jesus Christ Keaton's hair in [R38]'s clip."

She should have won that year for REDS. She was amazingly good in that film. Having said that, I do love ON GOLDEN POND.

I liked the scene when Hepburn gets fed up with Fonda's dementia, yells "you old shit!" and hits him over the head with the Parcheesi board. After he collapses Jane tells Hepburn that's elder abuse and they both start laughing.

Stanwyck would have been perfection. A realistic performance given without Hepburn’s over-the-top sweetness.

Plus, imagine Stanwyck slapping Jane. Epic.

I agree R88 It would have been quite wonderful to have Stanwyck working with Fonda again.

And I don't care that it was believably written into her character. Watching Hepburn shake incessantly gave me whiplash!

It was a movie where everyone is fighting with two unlikable, old horses asses. Didn’t ever appeal to me.

I can’t watch Jane’s desperate attempt to connect with her cold fish father onscreen. Which I’m sure was her only chance to because her father was a colder fish in real life.

Hepburn went ballistic when they rejected her idea for a scene. She wanted to put on her favorite strap-on and peg Henry on the dock while Loons called out in the background. She said, "Well, Spencer absolutely loved it when I did him."

*yawn*

I love that Hepburn never showed up when she was nominated for anything. Even if she really wanted to win, she gave it a whole air of dignity and was smart by putting distance between it.. You never got tired of seeing her.

Other actresses could learn a thing from this playbook.

[Quote] It would have been quite wonderful to have Stanwyck working with Fonda again.

both Fondas

The wealthy Coolidge family was quite influential at Squam Lake. I knew one of them - nasty lecherous fat old man whose breath smelled like cheese.

I was 18 when it came out and had little to no interest in it. We were on a class trip for Swing choir (aka "Glee" though we never called it that) and went to...Spirit Lake, Iowa? Near there. It was an overnight trip and that night we all went to the local multiplex. The music teacher and the chaperones and the "good" kids all went to see On Golden Pond. The rest of us went and saw Porky's.

I think the adults learned afterwards that we had gone to some lewd, nasty movie and there was pursed lips about it but....

I've still never sat through an entire screening of On Golden Pond. I've probably seen most of it, in drips and drabs, over time...it was on HBO an awful lot in the mid 80s.

It's gloppy and stagey.

It's me, you old poop!

I was molested in New Hamshire

Isn’t “On Golden Pond” the biopic about R. Kelly?

[quote]It's gloppy and stagey.

I think it has wonderful cinematography and makes good use of the beautiful NH scenery.

There's some interesting test footage of Lucille Ball playing Ethyl, shot before Gary talked her out of it. "Ah, Christ, Norman. Let the girl dive off the pier however she wants. Hey, you hear the loons? How WUNDAFUL!"

I loved it.

I saw this in 1981 while at college with friends and loathed it. When I hear the word treacly, the film always comes to mind.

I wanted to like Katherine Hepburn, but it was a period of blowing the dust off old actors for one last run. I knew little of Jane Fonda's acting and had no real opinion of it, until then. I've hated her work and her self-absorption since. (I saw her other films after that: Klute, Barefoot in the Park, Julia, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, The China Syndrome, The Morning After, and bits of her schlocky chick-flick comedies and she's always dreadful.)

As I recall, Golden Pond put me off lake houses and Minnesota or wherever the fuck it was set.

Hepburn came off more like Jane Fonda's dykey old aunt rather than her mother.

Bette Davis should've done it instead of Katharine Hepburn.

"NORRR-man. Can you HEAR the LOONS?!"

Ethyl is a kind of gasoline. Ethel is the character in the movie.

In all seriousness, I think Bette Davis would've been great in the role.

R109 She would have been a different kind of hammy in the role than Hepburn.

Bette wasn't hammy with the right director. She did a bunch of tv movies in the 70s and 80s where she didn't do the whole "Bette Davis" thing and was pretty subdued.

I can see Lucy scheming her way into singing with the loons. MY SONG.

The piano theme that opens this movie is an incredible piece of music.

Lucy in On Golden Pond would've been riveting!