The Hired Hand (1971) A Long Lost-Masterpiece from Peter Fonda (Review)

Following the industry-reshaping success of Easy Rider, the film’s three stars Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda took the opportunity to direct personal projects on a studio budget.  In the end, all three of them flopped, though they each have plenty of interest for students of those actors’ screen personae.  Nicholson’s Drive, He Said, for example, doesn’t share the flamboyant, eccentric character of his acting, instead providing a pessimistic, ambiguous view of student radicalism in the age of Vietnam.  Hopper’s The Last Movie, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of overreaching, excessive, borderline insane project you’d expect from him.

Fonda’s The Hired Hand, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Arrow Academy, is more than interesting – it’s a masterpiece.  It’s also probably the least famous of the three films.  Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which goes into extensive detail about the production of The Last Movie, contains only three fleeting mentions of it.  For a long time, the only available version was a TV edit which added 20 minutes of material (including a cameo by Larry Hagman) clarifying its fairly simple story of lost love and revenge.  Fonda felt this damaged the film.  He’d made a movie that was somehow a dreamy acid Western and a proto-Annie Proulx social realist Western at the same time, whereas the TV edit was just a Western.

Those twenty minutes are included as deleted scenes on this disc, but the main feature is Fonda’s original 91-minute cut, restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation in 2001 and re-released to rightly ecstatic reviews.  From the opening scene, a hazy slow motion shot of Robert Pratt bathing in the Rio Grande at sunset, it earns its place on Blu-Ray.  The cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond, who would also shoot Robert Altman’s fatalistic Western McCabe and Mrs Miller in the same year.  Both are astonishing visual achievements, but the idea of doing them back-to-back is incredible; going from Altman’s wintry, muddy, pre-Deadwood vision of the Old West to Fonda’s sun-soaked deserts and deep blue skies.

The Hired Hand is a film where every aspect stands out.  As well as Zsigmond’s photography, you also have Bruce Langhorne’s mournful, melodic score, pitting traditional country and western instrumentation against psychedelic production in a way that recalls Gram Parsons, or Basement Tapes-era Bob Dylan.  Even more crucial to the film’s success is Frank Mazzola’s staggeringly inventive editing, whose slow cross dissolves create breathtaking hybrid images.  A cowboy reading a funeral eulogy has his silhouetted head overlaid with dirt landing on the grave, and at one euphoric point Fonda and Warren Oates appear to be riding their horses across the clouds that open the next shot.

The imagery of The Hired Hand – and its omnipresent evening sunlight – anticipate the work of Terrence Malick, and like Malick’s films some viewers might find the plot evading them.  Stick with it.  Rather like Fonda’s tight-lipped central character Harry, The Hired Hand doesn’t give up its secrets quickly, but when they come they’re devastating.  The first half-hour is almost a picaresque, swinging from genuinely startling, chaotic gunfights to bucolic scenes of rural life.  Then, once Verna Bloom’s single mother enters the plot it becomes clear that Fonda and his screenwriter Alan Sharp have craftily smuggled the set-up for a grand tragedy into what seemed to be a beautiful trip.

Sharp pops up in the extras, which match the high standard set by recent Arrow releases such as The Hills Have Eyes and Cosmos in quantity and quality.  He appears in The Odd Man, a witty documentary about three Scottish authors co-directed by a pre-Gregory’s Girl Bill Forsyth.  Elsewhere, there are retrospective features, a short interview with Martin Scorsese about the restoration and a relaxed, affectionate commentary by Fonda.  He is, rightly, still amazed by the standard of work his collaborators turned in, and is full of praise for Langhorne, Sharp, Oates, Bloom and Mazzola.

As well he should be.  I had worried, when watching The Hired Hand, whether all those critics who praised the 2001 restoration were indulging in the same kind of behaviour you see in some Northern Soul fans; the exultation of work from a purported Golden Age not because it’s good, but because it’s from the right era.  As it turns out, Fonda’s film has a lot more to offer beyond the chance to revisit the glories of the 1970s New Hollywood.  It is an extraordinary film, and anyone interested in truly great film-making – the kind where everything is working at full capacity – needs it on their shelf.

Thanks for reading our review of The Hired Hand

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