The Hired Hand
Encyclopedia
The Hired Hand is a 1971 American western film
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 directed by Peter Fonda
Peter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...

, with a screenplay by Alan Sharp
Alan Sharp
Alan Sharp a novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and since then has written the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States....

. The film stars Fonda, Warren Oates
Warren Oates
Warren Mercer Oates was an American actor best known for his performances in several films directed by Sam Peckinpah including The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia...

, and Verna Bloom
Verna Bloom
Verna Bloom is an American actress. She co-starred in the 1973 film High Plains Drifter with Clint Eastwood and the 1974 made for TV movie Where Have All The People Gone? with Peter Graves and Kathleen Quinlan...

. The cinematography was by Vilmos Zsigmond
Vilmos Zsigmond
Vilmos Zsigmond, A.S.C. is a Hungarian-American cinematographer.In 2003, a survey conducted by the International Cinematographers Guild placed Zsigmond among the ten most influential cinematographers in history.-Biography:...

, and Bruce Langhorne
Bruce Langhorne
Bruce Langhorne is an American folk musician. He was active in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, primarily as a session guitarist for folk albums and performances...

 provided the moody film score
Film score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...

. The story is about a man who returns to his abandoned wife after seven years of drifting from job to job throughout the southwest. The embittered woman will only let him stay if he agrees to move in as a hired hand.

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, and was not issued on home video
Home video
Home video is a blanket term used for pre-recorded media that is either sold or rented/hired for home cinema entertainment. The term originates from the VHS/Betamax era but has carried over into current optical disc formats like DVD and Blu-ray Disc and, to a lesser extent, into methods of digital...

 format until 2001, when, following critically acclaimed showings of a fully restored version at various film festivals, it was released by the Sundance Channel on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

.

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
Severn Darden
Severn Teakle Darden, Jr. was a comedian and actor, and an original member of The Second City Chicago-based comedy troupe as well as its predecessor, the Compass Players...

). 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. They kidnap Harris and Collings is forced to leave Hannah once again to save his friend. In a subsequent brutal shootout with McVey's gang, all of the villains are killed but Collings is fatally wounded. Harris rides back alone to Hannah's house.

Cast

  • Peter Fonda
    Peter Fonda
    Peter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...

     .... Harry Collings
  • Warren Oates
    Warren Oates
    Warren Mercer Oates was an American actor best known for his performances in several films directed by Sam Peckinpah including The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia...

     .... Arch Harris
  • Verna Bloom
    Verna Bloom
    Verna Bloom is an American actress. She co-starred in the 1973 film High Plains Drifter with Clint Eastwood and the 1974 made for TV movie Where Have All The People Gone? with Peter Graves and Kathleen Quinlan...

     .... Hannah Collings
  • Robert Pratt .... Dan Griffen
  • Severn Darden
    Severn Darden
    Severn Teakle Darden, Jr. was a comedian and actor, and an original member of The Second City Chicago-based comedy troupe as well as its predecessor, the Compass Players...

     .... McVey
  • Rita Rogers .... Mexican Woman
  • Ann Doran
    Ann Doran
    Ann Lee Doran was an American character actress.-Early life and career:Born in Amarillo, Texas, Doran began acting at the age of four. She appeared in hundreds of silent films under assumed names to keep her father's family from finding out about her work...

     .... Mrs. Sorenson

  • Ted Markland .... Luke
  • Owen Orr .... Mace
  • Al Hopson .... Bartender
  • Megan Denver .... Janey Collings
  • Michael McClure
    Michael McClure
    Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...

     .... Plummer
  • Gray Johnson .... Will
  • Larry Hagman
    Larry Hagman
    Larry Martin Hagman is an American film and television actor, producer and director known for playing J.R. Ewing in the 1980s primetime television soap opera Dallas and Major Anthony "Tony" Nelson in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie.-Early life and career:Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas...

     .... Sherrif (television version only)


Production

Due to the huge financial success of Easy Rider
Easy Rider
Easy Rider is a 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...

(1969), Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie 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
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...

’s The Last Movie
The Last Movie
The Last Movie is a 1971 drama film from Universal Pictures. It was written and directed by Dennis Hopper, who also played a horse wrangler named after the state of Kansas. It also starred Peter Fonda, Henry Jaglom and Michelle Phillips...

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
Audio commentary
On disc-based video formats, an audio commentary is an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with video...

 provided on the film’s DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 release, Fonda’s job as neophyte filmmaker was made relatively easy thanks to a of polished character actors, led by Warren Oates. In addition, cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...

 Vilmos Zsigmond provided naturalistic imagery that helped belie the modest budget. Fonda’s selection of the then-unknown Bruce Langhorne
Bruce Langhorne
Bruce Langhorne is an American folk musician. He was active in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, primarily as a session guitarist for folk albums and performances...

 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.

Response

The Hired Hand received generally mixed reviews, with some critics flippantly dismissing the film as a “hippie-western”. Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

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." Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

described it as "pointless, virtually plotless, all but motionless and a lode of pap."
But Roger Greenspun of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

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.” Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks is a film critic and motion picture screenwriter.He is a graduate of Kenyon College. He was a critic for Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, among other magazines, before moving into film writing....

 wrote that the film was "a fine, elegiac western".

Despite Universal’s hopes for another Easy Rider-sized youth hit, The Hired Hand was an enormous flop
Flop
- Terms :*Flop, a box office bomb in the entertainment world*Flop, as verb or noun, referring to flophouse, cheap rooms in a transients' hotel*Flop , a poker term describing the first three cards dealt to the board...

. 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. The film is now well regarded as a minor western classic, with a 91% favorability rating on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

. Bill Kauffman
Bill Kauffman
Bill Kauffman is an American political writer generally aligned with the paleoconservative movement. He was born in Batavia, New York, and currently resides in Elba, New York, with his wife and daughter....

 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." However, some critics find the film overrated. Glenn Erickson
Glenn Erickson
Glenn Erickson is an American film editor and film critic. He started in the film industry in 1975 as an editor of low budget films and later worked in minor technical crew capacities in such major films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941...

 (aka “DVD Savant”) believed the movie was “light in the story department and directed at a mannered crawl…”

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 actually 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." Some of the deletions were relatively minor, but the most substantial excision involved the death of Ed Plummer (Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...

), and the subsequent homicide investigation by the local sheriff (Larry Hagman
Larry Hagman
Larry Martin Hagman is an American film and television actor, producer and director known for playing J.R. Ewing in the 1980s primetime television soap opera Dallas and Major Anthony "Tony" Nelson in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie.-Early life and career:Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas...

). For the 2001 release, Fonda once again removed the footage. All twenty minutes have been added to the DVD as an extra.
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