The Hired Hand
Spoilers! 1971's THE HIRED HAND is a Western very much of its post counterculture era. Alan Sharp's screenplay is filled with notions that (maybe) never would've flown in a John Ford picture of earlier times. But Mr. Ford's skill would've been very much appreciated for this mixed bag of a film, directed by its lead, Peter Fonda. It was his first venture behind the camera, and it tends to reek of film student excess, beginning with its lengthy opening scene of a man luxuriating in a stream. Something you might expect in an Antonionni movie, but it felt wrong here. The rest of the picture has numerous uses of slow motion, dissolves, and freeze frames in attempts to be artistic and meaningful. Some of the superimpositions of characters' faces were just plain odd to me. Fonda had just come off the enormous success of EASY RIDER, and he and co-star Dennis Hopper were given blank checks by the studios to create their own new works of art (the latter made ...
