Movies - The Hired Hand

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	Movies - The Hired Hand

The Hired Hand is a 1971 western film directed by Peter Fonda, with a screenplay by Alan Sharp. The film stars Fonda, Warren Oates, and Verna Bloom.

Plot

Harry Collings (Fonda) and Arch Harris (Oates) are two saddle tramps who have grown weary after seven years of wandering through the southwest. Along with a younger companion, Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt), they stop off in Del Norte, a ramshackle town in the middle of nowhere run by the corrupt McVey (Severn Darden). Harris and Griffen discuss traveling to California to look for work when Collings abruptly informs them he has decided to return to the wife he had left years before. Griffen temporarily leaves the two in a bar while he goes to buy supplies. Some town thugs shoot him to death out of pure meanness. Collings and Harris manage to escape, but they return that night and Collings shoots McVey repeatedly in his feet, crippling him.

After riding hundreds of miles back to his old house, Collings finds that he is understandably less than welcome by his wife, Hannah (Bloom). In order to be allowed to stay, he offers his services not as a husband but as a mere “hired hand”. Hannah agrees and quickly puts him to work. Gradually, the distrust and unease caused by years of estrangement slip away, and the two begin to become close again. For the first time, Collings finds himself willing to settle down forever.

McVey and his troupe of hooligans, however, suddenly make it difficult for Collings to make what should have been an easy decision. Love and loyalty become strong factors for Collings, and he finds himself leaving Hannah once again, this time, he hopes, only temporarily…

Production

Due to the huge financial success of Easy Rider
(1969), Universal Studios gave the star of that film, Peter Fonda, full artistic control over The Hired Hand, his debut as a director. (Universal also did the same for Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie that same year.) The movie was shot in New Mexico in the summer of 1970 with a budget of slightly less than $1,000,000. As he would further elaborate on the audio commentary provided on the film’s DVD release, Fonda’s job as neophyte filmmaker was made relatively easy thanks to a remarkably well chosen cast of polished character actors, led by the always reliable Warren Oates. In addition, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond provided gorgeous, naturalistic imagery that helped belie the modest budget. Fonda’s selection of the then-unknown Bruce Langhorne as the film’s musical composer would prove to be greatly inspired, as nearly all of the film’s reviews singled out the score as being unusually expressive and beautiful.

Frank Mazzola edited the film into shape, and utilized a series of complex and poetic montages, which featured elaborate dissolves, slow motion, and overlapping still photography. Mazzola’s opening montage was praised by several critics as the film’s most memorable sequence. (Oddly, Fonda’s discussion on the DVD’s audio commentary neglected to detail Mazzola’s enormous contribution at all.)

Response

The Hired Hand received generally mixed reviews, with some critics flippantly dismissing the film as a “hippie-western”. An exception was Roger Greenspun in the New York Times, who praised the movie as, “(A) rather ambitious simple movie, with a fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning rising to the mystical, which seems so much a part of the very contemporary old West.”

Despite Universal’s hopes for another Easy Rider-sized youth hit, The Hired Hand was an enormous flop. It was sold to NBC-TV for subsequent television showings in 1973, where the majority of the film’s fans first saw the movie. After that, it became difficult to see, rarely repeated on television and playing only occasional film festivals over the years.

In 2001, the film was fully restored and exhibited at a number of festivals to a generally enthusiastic critical response. Subsequently, the Sundance Channel released a DVD of the film in two separate editions that same year. It should be noted that while the film is now well regarded as a minor western classic, some critics find the film overrated. Glenn Erickson (aka “DVD Savant”) believed the movie was “Light in the story department and directed at a mannered crawl…”

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