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 THE LAST MOVIE).   Neither succeeded, and both were guilty of unchecked pretension.  For THE HIRED HAND, it affects what is an interesting tale of a wanderer named Harry Collings (Fonda) who is weary with his aimless life and has decided to go back to the wife and child he abandoned years before.  He has two partners, his old friend Arch (Warren Oates) and the young  buck Dan (Robert Pratt), who want to go off to California.  After an altercation with some locals in a backwater, Dan is killed and Henry and Arch get a little revenge by ambushing those responsible.

Eventually they arrive at Harry's old home and find his wife Hannah (Verna Bloom), who is understandably angered and puzzled by his return, and daughter Janey (Megan Denver). Harry offers to stay along with Arch merely as hired hands, doing much needed work at the farm.  Hannah has become a hardened frontier woman in the ensuing six years, and coldly informs her wayward spouse of the terms of his new residency.  Harry learns from men around town that Hannah hasn't exactly taken a vow of celibacy since his departure.  Time passes.  Resolves soften.  Is Harry ready to be a husband again?

THE HIRED HAND is at its best with Harry and Hannah, realistically detailing their journey.  Arch's too, who decides he needs to continue on to the Coast after a time, so as to not disrupt any reconciliations.  But then the movie loops back to the earlier story - the aforementioned thugs reemerge, threatening Harry's attempts at restoration, and cause him to have to choose between friendship and family.  This sort of wrap around storyline is somewhat familiar in Westerns, and necessary for this film to reach its perfect, bittersweet conclusion, but I would've been happy with just a character study.

There is some good dialogue, and Fonda directs fairly well, save the cinematic gimmickry that really added nothing.  Much of the blame probably rests with editor Frank Mazzola, who also gets a credit for "montages."  Many late '60s/early '70s films used these sort of tricks, but Vilmos Zsigmond's gorgeous photography and Bruce Langhorne's evocative scoring - with stunning use of sitars, banjos, and fiddles - would've been enough.  The leads' performances (particularly Oates and Bloom) are very good, though Pratt is simply awful; he can't even die convincingly.   Overall, the film (subversive or otherwise) achieves strong emotional impact by that final image, and that is what I always come back to.  It really stays with you.