Peter Fonda, an Easy Rider In for The Long Haul

Three kinds of people wear cowboy boots: real cowboys, fake cowboys and nobility, the last of those on the principle that nobility can wear anything and look swell.

Of the three categories, Peter Fonda fits both the first, by virtue of many appearances in westerns, and the last, by virtue of two strains of blue blood running through his veins, one out of Old Hollywood and the other New Hollywood. Fake he ain't, not nohow, not no way.

So he sits in a Washington hotel room, relaxed, lean, long, smooth, and on the coffee table before him are his boots. These boots aren't made for walking, that's for sure. They're too beautiful. Clearly hand-tooled, the boots are mahogany with turquoise highlights on the shaft, beautifully shined, and they look so cool protruding from the end of long, faded jeans. You could wear a gun with such boots, ride a horse or a chopper, wear chaps, leather, a ponytail, any kind of shades, any kind of tattoo and it would just make you cooler and cooler. You'd be so cool!

And there's Fonda himself, easily the world's coolest 68-year-old, with his pale blue eyes, his laconic, iconic beauty with its echoes of so much that is great in American films, come to town to front "3:10 to Yuma," a rare, actual 21st-century American western, if adapted from a 1957 film.

"Uh, Mr. Fonda -- " someone begins.

"Mr. Fonda died in 1982," he says in that whispery, originally-from-Omaha voice with a little bit of laugh behind it, signifying a joke and not an offense taken.

It's a treasured line, one suspects, well used, but welcome nevertheless. He's lightening up. He's saying: You relax, I already have. He is saying: I am not my father. I am Peter, son of Henry, a different kind of man. But, he is saying, we can also talk about Dad.

Well, let's talk about Dad.

Henry Fonda was the king, a reigning American film star for 40 years with at least a dozen great (and 2 1/2 dozen good) movies to his credit, an actor who became an icon of Midwestern decency, nobility, common sense, stubbornness and quiet elegance. Peter, his only son, is the prince: Not quite up to the old man's chops (maybe because the business changed, and that kind of elegant dignity was no longer the prime substance of the star), he has still charted his way through a complex, illustrious but always singular big-screen career that has lasted through 57 films.

And there's other strain, too. By a certain weirdness of time and place, this same Peter Fonda, this same famous star's son was also present at the creation and the avatar of an anti-Hollywood Hollywood that came to Earth in the '60s. It stood for everything his father stood against. It stood for the end of stars and studios, for a new, ruder, rougher, shaggier film culture. It was anti-classic, it denied narrative and old myth for fracture and new myth. He is associated with at least three seminal films from that era, first of course the famous "Easy Rider," the 1969 megahit that essentially invented the counterculture (he played a character called "Captain America," and rode a magical stallion in the form of an elegant chopper, with red-white-and-blue gas tank and angel-wing handlebars, as sleek and long and beautiful as he was), but also "The Wild Angels" and "The Hired Hand."

Along the way he broke his back a couple of times on cycles, had a daughter who became a star (Bridget), and generally stood for an American style that nearly everyone could respond to: nothing forced, nothing fraudulent, nothing grasping, nothing too ambitious, just being what you were. That was cool.

Now Fonda, who goes away and hides from his chosen profession for years at a time, is back, playing a key role in an expensive remake with big-name stars, extended ammunition, a healthy budget for phony blood, and about an additional half-hour, in the modern fashion, than the Delmer Daves original.