The Big Picture

Easy Rider
pioneered New Hollywood but didn’t age well as a film.
Universal sought innovative films post-
Easy Rider
and funded directors’ ambitious projects.

The Hired Hand
is a masterpiece blending creativity, aesthetic, pace, cinematography, and themes.

Toward the end of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the 1969 film that—among a few others—effectively inaugurated the counter-cultural turn in New Hollywood, Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, says to his partner-in-crime Billy, (Hopper), “We blew it.” Of course, he could be referring to the way they squandered any meaningful opportunities that their misbegotten drug money could have afforded them. However, in the context of the film, he seems to be making a grander statement, referring instead to their misguided attempt at capturing spiritual and personal freedom by indulging impulses and chasing whims. In their quest to conquer America’s vastness, they only discovered how much it was really closing in on them. Easy Rider was a worthy experiment in free-form, acid-soaked cinema, nearly inseparable from the cultural moment that created it, but in retrospect, it isn’t really a greatfilm. The Hired Hand, however, is an excellent one.

After the surprise success of Easy Rider and in the fallout of the total collapse of the studio system, the legacy studios in Hollywood were desperate for exciting pictures that could recreate the finger-on-the-pulse zeitgeist of the Hopper/Fonda joint. Universal created a program to provide emerging filmmakers with a million-dollar budget for whatever they wanted to make, but this initiative did not see especially strong returns. Hopper’s film, The Last Movie, was a categorical disaster, and Monte Hellman’s inventive Two-Lane Blacktop was, unfortunately, a financial failure. Nonetheless, these films are distinctive time-capsules that are inextricably tied to the industrial context that created them. The Hired Hand was Fonda’s go at a Universal bail-out, and while it certainly didn’t succeed on that front, it remains the best film of the bunch. A coming together of several all-time great artists at the beginning of their most verdant eras, this film applied a wild verve of creativity to a restrained, languid film.

The Hired Hand (1971) Harry returns home to his wife and farm after drifting with his friend Arch and has to make a difficult decision regarding his loyalties.Release Date July 17, 1971 Cast Peter Fonda , Warren Oates , Verna Bloom , Robert Pratt , Severn Darden , Rita Rogers , Ann Doran , Ted Markland Runtime 90 Minutes Writers Alan Sharp

What Is ‘The Hired Hand’ About?
Peter Fonda’s directorial debut, The Hired Hand, is a 1971 revisionist Western with a singular approach to its genre. In an introduction to the film aired before TV showings on the Sundance channel, Martin Scorsese describes how the atmosphere of counter-culture pervaded the films of the era. It wasn’t all rage and fury, though. If Fonda’s character made the realization that his anti-establishment aspirations were naught but a selfish and facile fantasy at the end of Easy Rider, thenThe Hired Hand begins with that revelation already understood.

It’s easy to see how Scorsese was influenced by this gentle yet brutal anti-Western. What follows is a slow, haunting, tragic, and psychedelic rumination on regret, social power, and the limits and consequences of control. Fonda plays Harry, an exhausted drifter whose time on the road has only sharpened his pain of regret for leaving a life behind. Warren Oates plays his partner and friend of seven years, Arch. Harry tells Arch and the young man they have with them that he’s leaving this nomadic life behind and going back home. Apparently, Harry left behind a wife and an infant child, and has now been on the road for much longer than he spent with his family. After a dispute with some small-town thugs leaves their young friend dead, Arch decides to accompany his friend to his home and do what he can to help out.

‘The Hired Hand’ Showed What an Arthouse Western Could Be Before ‘Dead Man’ or ‘The Power of the Dog’

From the beginning, The Hired Hand reveals itself to be a complete departure from formal Western conventions. It is punctuated by slow, impressionistic montages which utilize glacial dissolves, superimpositions, and fluctuating frame rates. The psychedelia of this aesthetic perfectly complements the elegiac tone of the film; this is a true acid Western, but rather than debauched tripping, these formal mechanisms create the impression of a half-forgotten memory. They also lend the laconic script a poetic quality, imbuing concise, cool dialogue with a romantic and ethereal quality.

Despite being bookended with outbursts of violence, the bulk of the film is a sensitive and intimate portrayal of the relationships between Harry, Arch, and Harry’s wife, Hannah, played with indelible depth by Verna Bloom. Hannah—older than her estranged husband by ten years—resents him for leaving and doesn’t trust that he won’t do so again. In one scene, she is articulating this distrust to Arch, a kind and loyal man who is more emotionally aware than he lets on. “He’ll go,” she insists, “it’s just a matter of time.” Arch replies, “Well most things are, ma’am.” Despite its 90-minute runtime, The Hired Hand’s inventive montage editing, courtesy of Frank Mazzola, portrays the passage of time as grand and tragically inescapable.

With ‘The Hired Hand,’ Peter Fonda Was in Excellent Company

The stars aligned with the personnel involved in The Hired Hand; In addition to Mazzola’s aforementioned montages and screenwriter, Alan Sharp’s, brutally economical script, the cinematography was provided by Vilmos Zsigmund, who would later that year work on another all-time great revisionist Western, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Instead of focusing on historical authenticity like in Altman’s film, Zsigmund further honed in on impressionistic, mournful psychedelia. The film is littered with silhouettes and heavy shadows, providing the already poetic structure of the film with rhyming shot compositions and bold visual flourishes. Bruce Langhorne, a then-obscure figure in the Greenwich Village folk revival who was quietly becoming one of Bob Dylan’s most frequent collaborators, provided an impressive score. It’s a melancholy arrangement of strings, banjo, and sitar: a gorgeous reflection of both the 1960s cultural wave that inspired the film and the spiritual malaise being depicted in it.

There is violence in the film, and it is brutal, but the majority of the runtime is dedicated to Harry and Hannah, and their gendered experiences of the false promises of America’s “Manifest Destiny” mythology. By the time the film starts, Harry is already exhausted. He has wasted his time on the quixotic pursuit of freedom and adventure in the course of westward expansion, ideals only truly afforded to men. The disillusionment that Harry experiences is isolating and lonely, as well as the foundation of his strong bond with Arch, which renders loneliness as an inherent function of American masculinity. Loneliness burdens women on the other side of this dichotomy, as well. For the seven years that Harry is gone, Hannah has to tend to her land and her daughter alone, with only a revolving door of actual hired hands to help her. She finds comfort in sexual escapades with these men as well. Though she is unashamed of these affairs, Harry seems only to want to prove to her that he is there to stay. It’s not the affairs that sadden Hannah; instead, it’s the loneliness that necessitates them, a loneliness brought on by the world that men made. There are echoes of the women’s liberation movement in this story, and Bloom portrays her character with disarming intimacy.

Related This Kurt Russell Film Is One of the Most Brutal Westerns Ever Made It doesn’t get more gruesome than this modern cult Western horror.

The Hired Hand might be the perfect example of an overlooked gem. Lost in the constantly-shifting milieu of the 1960s counter-culture wave, this is a film that holds up to scrutiny today. It’s romantic, tragic, progressive, and stylistically exuberant. Like Scorsese alluded to, it’s a distinctive product of its cultural and industrial context, but it will persist as time moves on. Great art always does—it’s only a matter of time.

The Hired Hand is available to stream on Plex in the U.S.

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