The Hired Hand

The Hired Hand is a 1971 American western film directed by Peter Fonda, with a screenplay by Alan Sharp. The film stars Fonda, Warren Oates, and Verna Bloom. The cinematography was by Vilmos Zsigmond. Bruce Langhorne provided the moody film score. The story is about a man returning to his abandoned wife after six years of drifting from job to job throughout the Southwestern United States. The embittered woman will only let him stay if he agrees to move in as a hired hand.

For the book by Robert D. San Souci, see The Hired Hand: An African-American Folktale.
The Hired Hand
Theatrical film poster
Directed byPeter Fonda
Produced byWilliam Hayward
Written byAlan Sharp
StarringPeter Fonda
Warren Oates
Verna Bloom
Music byBruce Langhorne
CinematographyVilmos Zsigmond
Edited byFrank Mazzola
Production
company
The Pando Company
Distributed byUniversal Studios
Release date
  • August 11, 1971 (1971-08-11)
Running time
93 min.
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$1,000,000 (estimate)

Upon release, the film received a mixed critical response and was a financial failure. In 1973, the film was shown on NBC-TV in an expanded version, but soon drifted into obscurity. In 2001, a fully restored version was shown at various film festivals, gaining strong critical praise, and it was released by the Sundance Channel on DVD. It is now considered a classic Western of the period.[1]

Plot

Harry Collings (Fonda) and Arch Harris (Oates) are two saddle tramps who have grown weary after seven years of wandering through the American Southwest. Along with a younger companion, Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt), they stop off in Del Norte, a ramshackle town in the middle of nowhere, which is 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 left years before. Griffen temporarily leaves the two in a bar and goes to buy supplies. Some town thugs shoot him to death out of pure meanness. Collings and Harris escape, but they return that night. Collings shoots McVey in the feet, crippling him.

After riding hundreds of miles back to his old house, Collings finds a cold welcome from his wife Hannah (Bloom). In order to be allowed to stay, he offers his services simply as a "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 feels willing to settle down, but Harris leaves, wanting "to see the ocean" and feeling himself a potential obstacle to the couple's new intimacy.

McVey and his troupe of hooligans interrupt his life. Learning that they have kidnapped Harris, Collings leaves Hannah again, this time to save his friend. In a subsequent brutal shootout with McVey's gang, all of the villains are killed and Collings is fatally wounded. Harris rides alone to Hannah's house.

Cast

Production

Due to the huge financial success of Easy Rider (1969), which Fonda co-wrote, produced and starred in, Universal Studios gave him full artistic control over The Hired Hand, his debut as a director. (Universal also did the same for Dennis Hopper with The Last Movie that year.)

Fonda said "Alan's screenplay was given to me by a friend. I didn't know anything about him but I thought he must be very clever. Then I found out he was a Scotsman who'd never been to the American West. I was just knocked out because it spoke to me on so many levels."[2]

Hand was shot in New Mexico in the summer of 1970 with a budget of slightly less than $1,000,000. As he later discussed, Fonda was supported as a neophyte filmmaker by the cast of polished character actors, headed by Warren Oates. In addition, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond provided a high quality of naturalistic imagery. Zsigmond credited this film as his first major assignment in feature film: "... Before that ['The Hired Hand'], I basically did commercials. 'The Hired Hand' was probably the first time that I [as a cinematographer] actually had a dramatic story with good actors...." Fonda's selection of the then-unknown Bruce Langhorne as the film's musical composer was rewarded, as nearly all the film's reviews singled out the score as being unusually expressive and beautiful.

Frank Mazzola edited the film, using 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.

Release

Fonda recalled "Universal was going to put up a billboard on Sunset Blvd., showing me without a shirt, wearing a cowboy hat and a pistol stuffed in my pants. The billboard was going to say something like, THAT EASY RIDER RIDES AGAIN!' I went to Universal and said you take that down or I'll take it down. I was prepared to lake it down with explosives... They paid themselves a hefty fee upfront to distribute my film. I didn't see a pickass dime... At least I got them to take the billboard down."[3]

Reception

The Hired Hand received generally mixed reviews, with some critics dismissing the film as a "hippie-western."[4] Variety felt the film had "a disjointed story, a largely unsympathetic hero, and an obtrusive amount of cinematic gimmickry which renders inarticulate the confused story subtleties."[5] Time described it as "pointless, virtually plotless, all but motionless and a lode of pap."[6] But Roger Greenspun of The New York Times praised it 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."[7] Jay Cocks wrote that the film was "a fine, elegiac western."[8]

Despite Universal's hopes for another Easy Rider-sized youth hit, The Hired Hand was a commercial flop. It was sold to NBC-TV for subsequent television showings in 1973, when 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 occasionally at 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. The film is now well regarded as a minor western classic, with a 91% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 11 reviews.[9] Bill Kauffman has called it "a lovely meditation on friendship and responsibility, one of the least-known great movies of that richest of all cinematic eras, the early 1970s."[10] Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: The Western opined the film was "beautifully photographed by Zsigmond...a superb evocation of the rigours and essential aimlessness of frontier life."[11]

However, some critics found the film overrated. Glenn Erickson (aka "DVD Savant") believed the movie was "light in the story department and directed at a mannered crawl..." [12]

Television version

When NBC-TV first aired The Hired Hand in 1973, they reinstated twenty minutes of footage that Fonda had deleted from the theatrical cut as "extraneous". Glenn Erickson has argued that the previously missing footage is very important to the film's narrative, noting that "writer Alan Sharp created a pressing reason for Oates' character to take his leave", and further opined that these twenty minutes helped make The Hired Hand more strongly resemble "a standard film with a story, events, dialogue and character interaction."[12] The most substantial excision involved the death of Ed Plummer (Michael McClure), and the subsequent homicide investigation by the local sheriff (Larry Hagman). For the 2001 limited theatrical release, Fonda again removed the footage. All twenty minutes have been added to the DVD as an extra.

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gollark: What limit? Too long without yielding?
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See also

References
  1. Vagg, Stephen (October 26, 2019). "Peter Fonda – 10 Phases of Acting". Filmink.
  2. BEN-HUR? IT COULD DO WITH A REWRITE!McBeth, Jim. Daily Mail 12 Sep 2009: 34.
  3. Goldman, Lowell (Fall 1990). "Peter Fonda: I Know What It's Like to Be Dead". Psychotronic Video. No. 7. p. 35.
  4. Hoberman, J. "'The Hired Hand'". The Village Voice. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  5. Unknown Reviewer (1971-01-01). "The Hired Hand". Variety.com. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  6. Kalem, T.E. (1971-08-02). "A Lode of Pap". Time. Retrieved 2008-03-14.
  7. Greenspun, Roger (August 12, 1971). "'The Hired Hand':Peter Fonda Directs and Is Cast as Hero". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-10-23.
  8. Cocks, Jay (1973-12-03). "Terminal Station". Time. Retrieved 2008-03-14.
  9. "The Hired Hand". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  10. Kauffman, Bill (2009-09-01) Bill Kauffman, "Wild Oates", The American Conservative, 1 September 2009
  11. Hardy, Phil (editor). The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: The Western, Aurum Press, 1984. Reprinted as The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western, Overlook Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0879516253
  12. Erickson, Glenn (December 21, 2003). "The Hired Hand: Collector's Edition". DVD Savant. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
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