Home \ Signature Roles \ Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) — Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA · 1977 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Dick and Jane Harper are a comfortable suburban couple until Dick loses his aerospace job, and the bills keep coming.
Dick and Jane Harper are a comfortable suburban couple until Dick loses his aerospace job, and the bills keep coming. Jane Fonda plays Jane as the partner who stops waiting for rescue: she takes a job, she learns to shoplift, and finally she joins Dick in robbing the company that ruined them.
The film is a comedy, but its anger is real — it arrived in a decade of stagflation and corporate scandal, and audiences recognized their own anxieties in the Harpers’ slide from affluence to crime. Fonda’s comic timing, often overshadowed by her dramatic reputation, is the film’s engine: Jane is practical, exasperated, and increasingly delighted by her own criminal competence. It became one of the biggest hits of her career, and one of the funniest films about American economic fear ever made.
