Review by Roger Carpenter
By 1971 Peter Fonda was an icon of the counterculture. He’d starred in the LSD quickie The Trip as well as the pioneering biker film The Wild Angels. He was fresh off of Easy Rider and ready to spread his wings and show the viewing public that he was more than a pot-smoking hippie biker with his directorial debut, The Hired Hand.
The Hired Hand tells the story of Harry, a wayward soul who married too early and took off to see the world with his two buddies, Arch (Warren Oates) and Dan (Robert Pratt). After years in the wilderness, the three determine to head to California and the Pacific Ocean, but Dan unexpectedly dies along the way and Harry (Peter Fonda) decides it’s time to head home, to the wife and infant daughter he left seven long years ago. But will she take Harry back, or has she moved on with her life?
Critics throw terms around in reviews all the time, and I’m about to do the same. But hopefully I’ll back my assertions up with facts. The Hired Hand is an anti-western. This is true for many reasons, the first being that, according to Fonda himself, his overarching concept was to create a film that portrayed the 1880’s west as realistically as possible. So no cowboys and gunslingers getting killed bloodlessly. No one dies before they hit the ground. The reality is that death sometimes allows life to linger for a while before moving in and taking over. There is pain. There is sorrow. While The Hired Hand is no Wild Bunch, filled with graphic violence and blood flying everywhere, it’s no less powerful when addressing death. While there is very little blood, people don’t die quickly, leading to several very powerful scenes—scenes in which men cry for their mothers or ask to be held by other men while they die. These are not the typical death scenes in classic Hollywood westerns, where men die quickly and stoically. These cowboys are human beings, with all the emotions of human beings.
Aside from this, the film is less about cowboys and The West as it is about friendship, love, revenge, and redemption. It happens to be set in the early 1880’s in the west, so there are plenty of western tropes. But the underlying foundation of the story goes all the way back to Greek literature and is still being told today in books and films. So forget that the characters all wear hats, ride horses, and carry guns. Forget the setting is in the southwestern U.S. The story is timeless and could be told just as easily in any time and in any location. An anti-western.
Fonda set out to do something different from his earlier ‘B’ pictures and to set himself apart from these exploitation films. And he did it in spades. When critics list their “most beautiful films” The Hired Hand is never mentioned, but it should be. A young Vilmos Zsigmond acted as cinematographer. His photography is simply stunning. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous and the sunsets are some of the most spectacular ever filmed. The film is a very quiet film. It’s languid—it takes its time in telling the story. The measured pacing might be off-putting for those expecting a typical western but I was captivated by every moment of the film. The score is simple and filled with instruments that would have been played in 1880: guitar; banjo; harmonica; mandolin. And all were played by the same man, Bruce Langhorne, a musical virtuoso. The score, too, is gentle and quiet, and aurally matches the beauty of Zsigmond’s cinematography. Editing was completed by Frank Mazzola who, like composer Langhorne, only racked up a dozen or so credits over his lifetime but was busy with other projects as well. Mazzola proved to be a master of the montage and while that particular technique can sometimes be overused, in this case, montage is used to near perfection. It’s a technique that Mazzola utilized throughout the film and is always well-done and, in staying close to the heart of the film, is done beautifully.
While the storytelling, cinematography, musical score, and editing are all excellent, the acting is standout as well. Fonda stars as Harry, who was only 20 when he was married. It didn’t take long for him to become restless with his marriage, except in this case his mistress was the frontier. We never see the exchange between Harry and his wife as he leaves; instead, we are introduced to Harry after many years of traveling the wilderness and only learn of his past later on in the film. Did he have a discussion with his wife or did she awaken one day to learn she was abandoned? Harry can read and write, so did he leave a note or was his wife forced to come to terms with his departure over weeks or months of no communication? Did she know Harry loved her? While these questions are never addressed, the characters are portrayed with such depth that we want to know more, we want to understand the pain and the sorrow. Fonda portrays Harry as an enigma. He seldom speaks and when he does, it’s a short, matter of fact statement, and then he’s done. He wastes no time on expounding on his feelings and very rarely are his feelings on display. In one scene Dan discovers the body of a little girl which has accidentally been tangled in their fishing line. Harry cuts the line to Dan’s dismay, and explains that “the body would come to pieces in your hands on the first tug.” He has sympathy for others but he also has experience that is never addressed in the actual film. When Dan is murdered shortly thereafter, you can see his blood boiling, but, unlike in a typical western where the hero starts a shootout in a bar, drops 30 people, and walks out unscathed, Harry understands this is not the time to pick a fight. It is suggested to him the body be buried the next day since it’s very late but Harry simply says, “We’ll bury him tonight.” Even his initial encounter with the wife he left is enigmatic. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t beg, he doesn’t try to reason. He simply asks for a trial basis as a hired hand on the farm, living in the barn. The closest we get to any real emotion is when he realizes his lifelong friend, Arch, is in imminent peril and he must once again leave his wife after only a few weeks. He is frustrated at her for not understanding and is clearly upset at Arch’s predicament. But, throughout the film, we never learn much about who Harry really is, nor what drives him to make such fateful decisions in his life.
Co-star Warren Oates, as Arch, is a delight. As Arch, Oates portrays wisdom. Like Harry, he speaks seldom and normally in as few words as possible. But his words are measured and important. He is the only true friend Harry has and, perhaps the only love of Harry’s life, in the familial sense of the word. The two are inseparable. Oates was rarely a leading man but made a career out of playing villains. Perhaps most famous for his long-time professional relationship with Sam Peckinpaugh, Oates honed his craft in westerns and dramas throughout the 1960’s and, though he was nearly always in a supporting role, became one of the few character actors identifiable to the public by name and face. Just as he supported many stars over a lifetime of films, Oates is outstanding as he supports Fonda’s character of Harry in this film, always going where Harry wants to go, doing what Harry wants to do. He is a calming influence on Harry, however. For instance, Arch quietly recommends to Harry that they seek revenge at a later time when they are surrounded and outgunned by the men who killed Dan. It’s Arch who goes along with Harry’s revenge the next day even as he warns Harry it might not be a good idea. And Arch follows Harry home, living in a barn even as Harry moves back into his own home before finally determining to leave Harry and his wife on their own once he’s satisfied that all is well.
Supporting Fonda and Oates is Robert Pratt as the young Dan, “full of piss and vinegar,” as Arch describes him. He’s probably around 20 years old himself, tempestuous, naïve, and impulsive. He portrays innocence. He wants to give the little girl on the fishing line a proper burial—not a bad thought at all—but Harry understands the shape the corpse is in and has a more realistic concept about it than Dan. Dan wants to head to California to see the ocean because he has heard about its beauty, so the trio determine to do just that. Unfortunately, Dan’s innocence gets him killed in a small village along the way. This sequence is one of the main drivers of the film as it sets up the motive for revenge, by both Fonda as Harry as well as Severn Darden as the mean-spirited McVey, who will kill a man for his horse. Darden is only in a handful of scenes but he is pitch-perfect as the wolf in sheepskin. Harry and Arch understand this; Dan does not.
Finally, there is Verna Bloom, who plays Harry’s wife, Hannah. She played in the likes of Medium Cool, Animal House, High Plains Drifter, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Bloom has the perfect look for a pioneer woman. Still young but dark from the sun and beginning to be wrinkled, hair pulled up in a bun, she has a look of no-nonsense severity to her. She looks like every single pioneer woman in every old-time photo you have ever seen. And she does more with her eyes and face than perhaps any other actress in the past 40-plus years. The look of realization she has when she finally recognizes her wayward husband standing in front of her porch is almost one of horror and shock, than of pleasure. She had written him off years ago. A scene with Oates is equally powerful. Oates questions why she doesn’t have a dog, noting it’s rare to see a homestead without one. Hannah replies that she used to have one before it ran off, adding that she never quite saw the need to get another after that betrayal. Another powerhouse scene has Hannah confronting Harry when Harry brings up rumors he’s heard in town about Hannah sleeping with her hired hands. Hannah’s reply is simple and to the point: she was lonely, he was lonely, and she had needs that went unfulfilled thanks to Harry leaving her. She basically tells him “tough luck” but you don’t have a right to judge me, for this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t have left. But even Hannah, as kind as she is, can’t help being mean. She goes on to describe the actions she had with other men as sometimes being in the barn, sometimes in the dirt “like two dogs.” She wants her humiliations to be Harry’s humiliations. She wants her pain to be his pain. It is a remarkably powerful performance through few words and many facial expressions—an actor’s dream job.
Don’t go into The Hired Hand if you are expecting a typical western of the 50’s or 60’s. Don’t go into The Hired Hand if you are expecting Peckinpaugh’s stylized ultraviolence or the spaghetti western motifs of the time. This is a character-driven drama that happens to be placed in a time and location that identifies it as a “western.” Expect to be moved—by the story, the scenery, the acting, the cinematography, the score. And expect to be mystified—at why this film flopped at the box office on its initial release in 1971. Was it the atrocious ad campaign? Was it such an unexpected Fonda film that audiences were confused? Or was it just a victim of the time in which it was made? Whatever the reason, if you’ve never seen The Hired Hand, now is the time as Arrow Video USA has issued a brand-new Blu-Ray of the film. Special features include an hour-long documentary on the making of the film, completed in 2003 as the film was being restored; another hour-long documentary on Scottish screenwriters, including Alan Sharp who wrote the screenplay for The Hired Hand; a fairly lengthy audio interview with Fonda and Oates from 1971 in London; a short interview with Martin Scorcese; deleted/extended scenes; and a commentary by Fonda himself. Several film trailers and TV and radio spots round out the package.
You can purchase the film directly from Arrow Video at http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/category/usa/ or from Amazon.
