This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Strong and Moving!

Boring

Beautiful music signed Bruce Langhorne. Otherwise, the film does not say much. Because it's not happen much. And what is happening, is not at all justified. Why is shot Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt), the young companion of Harry Collings (Peter Fonda) and Arch Harris (Warren Oates)? Nobody knows. Then, why is taken prisoner Arch Harris? I wonder if the writer Alan Sharp knew. I doubt it. Warren Oates is a very good actor. But here he does not have much to do. Peter Fonda is just the son of his father(Henry Fonda, for those who don't know) and the brother of his sister(Jane Fonda). I think he wanted to look like Clint Eastwood in those movies with dollars, but without being a Western. All the fault of the same Sergio Leone. But, how many people know or realize that?

its beauty is almost spectacular. and result of high science of detail. portrait of West life, it is pure poetry. precise, gracefully, delicate, film of silence and small gestures, using admirable cinematography and reflecting a wise vision of Peter Fonda about a world who, in many films, is represented only by the outside aspects. a film about soul of few people, a land and desire. refined and convincing. powerful and strange because it has the courage and force and science to define in deeper manner the genre. one of rare Westerns who impose the essence of a style of life, importance of its values and the need of happiness. a film about solitude, family and duty. about the ambiguity of relations out of classic definitions. an admirable work. and, out of doubts, a masterpiece.

The Hired Hand is a New Hollywood masterpiece from Peter Fonda, a reflective Western in which redemption comes not through revenge, but romance, in all its selfish, selfless glory. Its title comes from the stone of story at its centre, in which Fonda tries to atone for walking out on his wife (Verna Bloom, shorn of all vanity) by signing on as her hired hand, accompanied by his friend Warren Oates. That set-up suggests gender battles or sexual power-games, but what we get is something altogether quieter, subtler and more persuasive: a story about forgiveness, dependence and the healing of wounds, with an almighty kick in the tail that takes genre mythology and proceeds to do something unforgettable with it. The relationship between the reformed, gentle Fonda and his strong, unrepentant wife only accounts for perhaps a third of the running time, but gives the film such heart that it can justify the numerous asides and self-contained vignettes: a fatal shot from out of nowhere, an early-morning mission of vengeance and the shattering of a tranquil idyll as a young girl's dead body snags on a fishing line.Fonda's Easy Rider is a great film, because it captures a feeling, epitomises an entire period and exploded an outmoded cinematic status quo, but it isn't a very good film. It's tacky, juvenile, boring and full of ridiculous visual quirks that make no narrative sense (there's a reason why no-one uses those juddering transitions it attempted to initiate, and it's that they're pointless and crap). The Hired Hand, however, is a film touched with that refined, adventurous brilliance that seemed to be in the air in '70s Hollywood. It's visually outstanding, but it's more than that: it's like Monte Walsh - William Fraker's film about the "last cowboy" - but loaded with longing and sexual angst, and equipped with some trippily avant garde imagery that still stays true to the genre, Fonda, photographer Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Frank Mazzola simply kicking Winton C Hoch's eye-popping compositions up a notch. The most remarkable has Fonda and Oates talking by a corral. As they turn gradually to silhouettes, close-ups of their faces illuminate the sky behind, tinted by the setting sun. It's a jaw-dropping trick that pitches them as Western icons, larger-than-life, greater than contemporary folk heroes and at one with the sprawling plains and vast skies that are - or were - America. Fonda isn't interested in a conventional narrative, more in evoking an atmosphere, and as he slips from one episode to the next, he layers one piece of footage - a body twisting in a river, horses stalking along the trail - over the next. It's odd, then, that some of the interior scenes in the early part of the film look flat and cheap, if not '50s-B-Western shoddy.Fonda is superb, while Bloom, one of the best things about Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, gives a remarkable performance as a woman who refuses to repent after looking for sexual solace in his absence, but yearns to be loved - and not just wanted. It's only during her pivotal speech that I feel she falters, but perhaps subsequent viewings will be kinder. And Oates? Well, Oates is simply sensational. Perhaps only Jason Robards ever combined the scuzzy, the world-weary and the roguishly appealing as well as the toothy, grubby, bearded Oates, and as a good guy fighting the lust coursing through his body, he damn well walks away with the film. The Hired Hand is one of the great movies of the '70s: a unique, unsentimental vision that doesn't seek to dismantle the Western, as Altman would with McCabe and Mrs Miller, but to take its iconography and its stock characters somewhere new. The gunfighter still rides to the rescue. The showdown still happens. And his body still falls to the floor with that same sickening thud. But then a hired hand returns to a homestead and closes a door, and we realise that there was never a Western like it, and that none ever gave us an ending like this, in all its simple, beautiful and perfect ambiguity.

I'm surprised at the maturity Peter Fonda the director displays with THE HIRED HAND. It'll be a fruitless search to attempt to find a western resonating with the ambiance and themes of THH in its time. It would take quite a few years for the American western to embrace this new take on the mythos of the old west - far removed from the works of John Ford, Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks.THH relates a small but intimate drama about three men travelling west for California - the gold, the ocean, the cold beer, it's a promised land of sorts for drifters like them. After a deadly incident in a small, rundown village where they bury the younger companion, the other two, Harry (Peter Fonda) and Artch (Warren Oates) decide to turn back and instead of California return to Harry's wife - whom he abandoned six years ago to become a drifter.Upon their return Harris finds a frigid and distant wife, reluctant to have him back. She satisfied her natural sexual frustration over the years by sleeping with the men she hired - and that's exactly how she takes Harry back, a hired hand to do work around the house, until he can earn his way back as her husband.This little vucolic drama unfolds in some neck of the woods, unpretentious and stripped of all fat, laconic as much as it is melancholic. A simple story superbly told, with small nuances and glances and full images that stand in for a barrage of dialogue and the actors hitting all the right notes, underplaying it enough to suck you in the heart of it all.It is only natural then that Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography matches the tone of the script. Beautiful exterior shots turn the landscape, in turns rugged and comforting, into another character. The only misstep, in my opinion, in the visual aspect of THH is the overuse of montages - Fonda superimposes image upon image as a transitory device which doesn't always work that well. I prefer full, clean images as far as that goes.I can't find any major faults with THH - apart from that it's not what many western fans might be looking for which is of course not an inherent flaw of the film. The third act builds into a gritty and violent revenge subplot that includes a short but terrific shootout whose outcome is suffused with bitter irony. Apart from that however THH doesn't have anything in the way of action, no wild galloping through the prairie, no robbers holding up banks and no cavalries chasing away injuns.As much sombre as it is elegiac, heartfelt and poignant, THH might be little seen but remains one of the best westerns of the 70's. Fans of UNFORGIVEN, OPEN RANGE and the recent THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES will find something to appreciate.