The Farmer Takes a Wife

Henry Fonda's first film, 1935, from the Walter D. Edmonds novel: a canal-boat girl (Janet Gaynor) and a farmer who wants her off the Erie and onto land. Victor Fleming directed for Fox. Fonda, already the face, playing a man who thinks a farm is an argument. Gaynor, a decade after 7th Heaven, still the girl who has to choose a life. It is a canal picture about a country moving from water to dirt, and Fonda arriving as if he had always been there.