11 • The Hired Hand
Just as Universal gave Hopper carte blanche to make his follow-up to Easy Rider, so too was his costar Fonda granted creative freedom for his directorial debut, left largely to his own devices by the same studio with a $1.2 million budget and a guarantee of final cut.1 Mulling over potential projects, Fonda was impressed by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp’s screenplay for The Hired Hand, which was in Fonda’s words, “the first western I had read that showed the life of a woman in the West of 1881.”2 This aspect immediately differentiates Sharp’s screenplay from the male-dominated realm of the traditional western, peering behind the curtain of machismo to consider the domestic lives of women on the frontier. Beyond its treatment of gender relations, The Hired Hand is a deceptively straightforward western in its fidelity to generic convention, contrasting with the exploded ambition of Hopper’s Last Movie. Fonda favors small flourishes of stylistic self-consciousness as he defamiliarizes, but eventually upholds and reinforces, western tropes. Where Hopper’s Last Movie forcibly tugs at generic and structural conventions until the film itself collapses, Fonda pursues a more understated revisionism, allowing his characters themselves to question their adherence to generic ritual, while the stylistic mode of the film itself remains intact. The Hired Hand employs poetic realism to retread its familiar narrative of a weary outlaw who is drawn back into the violent lifestyle he thought he had left behind, with fatal consequences.
The Hired Hand begins with three drifters, Harry Collings (Peter Fonda), Arch Harris (Warren Oates), and Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt), arriving in the small town of Del Norte, which is controlled by the villainous McVey (Severn Darden). After they discuss their desire to leave their itinerant lifestyles behind them and Harry’s ambition to return to the wife he abandoned years earlier, Griffen is murdered offscreen by McVey’s henchmen. Harry and Arch are lucky to survive the ensuing confrontation with McVey, and they return the next morning to take revenge, shooting their antagonist in his feet as he sleeps.
During the long ride through varied landscapes back to the family home he left many years ago, Harry confides in Arch that he fears the wife he hardly remembers may have married another man. Harry’s eventual arrival is met distrustfully by his older wife, Hannah (Verna Bloom). Eager to stay on and reconcile with his family, Harry offers to earn his keep as a hired hand, while Arch remains at the homestead while he decides on his next destination. The two men sleep in the barn and spend their days engaged in manual tasks, sharing meals at night with Hannah and her daughter Janey (Megan Denver). As Harry and Hannah gradually mend their relationship, Harry is dealt a blow when he learns on a visit into town that during his years of absence, Hannah had sexual affairs with other workers on the farm. Meanwhile, Arch grows closer and closer to Hannah; he decides to leave after a confrontation with Harry, allowing the couple to rekindle their intimacy.
Harry receives a letter from his adversary, McVey, informing him that he has imprisoned Arch, whose severed finger is enclosed with the letter. McVey states that he will release Arch in exchange for Harry, who is faced with the difficult decision of remaining with his family in newfound domestic bliss or leaving them once again to save the life of his friend. Ultimately Harry leaves, promising Hannah that he will return. McVey’s gang ambush Harry upon his arrival at Del Norte. Arch is freed in the ensuing shootout. Harry is killed, along with McVey and his cronies. The final scene of the film shows Arch returning to Hannah, who sits on the homestead porch awaiting the return of her husband.
Production Background
After apprenticing in the shipyards of his native Greenock, Scotland, Alan Sharp became a novelist, relocating first to London, where he wrote television dramas in the mid-1960s, and then to Hollywood.3 His first screenwriting credit was for The Last Run, in which George C. Scott played a professional driver who undertakes a cross-country criminal journey that is seemingly predestined to conclude with his own death. Undoubtedly hurt by troubled production (including Richard Fleischer’s taking the reins after the original director, John Huston, quit on set), The Last Run was poorly received by critics such as Ebert and Greenspun, who criticized both Fleischer’s direction and Scott’s performance.4 Sharp subsequently wrote The Hired Hand and later penned two of the definitive revisionist works of the 1970s: the savage Ulzana’s Raid (dir. Robert Aldrich, Universal Pictures, 1972) and the bleak and enigmatic Night Moves (dir. Arthur Penn, Warner Bros., 1975), as well as the scrambled, paranoiac adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s Cold War–era exploration of surveillance culture, The Osterman Weekend (dir. Sam Peckinpah, Twentieth Century Fox, 1983), which was Peckinpah’s last film. Sharp’s trademarks in all of these films were his tuneful ear for deadpan dialogue and a prevailing sense of fatal predestination.
Peter Fonda’s production partner, William Hayward (an associate producer on Easy Rider), brought Sharp’s screenplay for The Hired Hand to his attention, and Fonda was immediately attracted to its domestic focus and genre revisions.5 During the earliest stages of development, Fonda envisioned his father playing the Arch Harris role, a twist that would have played upon the weight of generational legacy that Peter carried with him into each role as he attempted to define his own cinematic persona. When the elder Fonda demurred on the grounds that he felt he was too old for the role, Peter recalled seeing Oates alongside his father in Welcome to Hard Times (dir. Burt Kennedy, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1967) and decided to cast him in the Harris role.6 Originally Fonda intended to shoot the film in Italy, but opted instead for New Mexico after finding suitable locations for the ghost town of Cabezo and the fertile ranch to which Harry returns.7 Produced by Hayward for Fonda’s Pando production company and greenlit for Universal by Ned Tanen, who later oversaw production on American Graffiti (dir. George Lucas, Universal Pictures, 1973) and Jaws (1975), shooting began in May 1970. Vilmos Zsigmond served as director of photography, endorsed by fellow Hungarian László Kovács, who was unavailable due to commitments on Hopper’s Last Movie and Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland.8 Fonda was anxious to stake his own claim to a legacy beyond Easy Rider, given his belief that Hopper had taken more than his fair share of credit for being the creative mastermind of the Easy Rider project, which had actually originated with Fonda’s late-night phone call to Hopper. Fonda’s decision to shoot The Hired Hand against the same kind of New Mexico landscapes that Easy Rider passed through would do nothing to blunt the comparisons.
Cross-fades and Montage
Easy Rider’s many references to the western have been well documented, including Billy and Wyatt’s monikers and garb; the crosscutting from the motorcycles to equine steeds; and the reversal of the westward journey, punctuated by campfire dialogue scenes in which the stoned Billy enthusiastically discusses the cinematic rituals of the western. Hopper and Fonda’s interest in genre revisionism was clearly not expunged with Easy Rider. With their respective follow-ups, each decided to work once again within a revisionist western vein. While Fonda’s film is a more traditional, stylistically conventional western than Hopper’s genre-smashing Last Movie, The Hired Hand still bears the marks of Easy Rider’s influence in interesting ways. One notable parallel is Fonda’s use of cross-fades during scene transitions, which diverges from Hopper’s prominent use of the flash cut during scene transitions in Easy Rider. Where Hopper’s flash cuts convey a twitchy, scrambled energy, Fonda’s leisurely overlapping cross-dissolves suggest a more languorous state. Yet as with the formally discrete musical sequences of Easy Rider, the montage/cross-fade sequences in The Hired Hand function as recurring spectacles of visual pleasure that do not strictly advance the narrative or impart expository information, but do convey a mood and sense of atmosphere.
The Hired Hand begins with an elongated series of overlapping dissolves depicting Fonda’s Harry at play within the glistening currents of a river, set to Bruce Langhorne’s score. These lengthy cross-fades allow multiple images to occupy the frame, one superimposed upon another, as each alternately fades from view only to be replaced by yet another image, suggesting a hallucinatory, drugged haze of doubled/recurring experience and the arresting of time. This effect contrasts with Hopper’s flash cuts piercing time, as premonitory glimpses of events yet to come intrude incrementally upon, then displace, the narrative present. More broadly speaking, Hopper’s use of musical sequences as self-contained spectacles of visual pleasure to break up longer scenes of dialogue and exposition finds its analog in Fonda’s similar segmentation of dialogue scenes through the use of protracted cross-fades, accompanied by Langhorne’s score.
Soundtrack
As was done in Easy Rider, The Hired Hand’s soundtrack is an integral element of the film’s formal tapestry. Narrative sequences continually give way to rhapsodic cross-fade/montage sequences like the lapping eddies of recollection, the repeated strains of Langhorne’s plucked banjo returning time and again almost like a sense memory, signaling that transition is under way. Given the way that drug use became synonymous with Fonda and Hopper’s public images after The Trip and Easy Rider, it is hardly surprising that for many viewers these woozy cross-fades evoked a drugged consciousness. Sharp criticized the final film for “reflect[ing] the influences of hallucinogens,”9 while Hoberman called the film “overtly druggy.”10
As well as adding a cosmic/hallucinatory element to each film, the montage sequences in both Easy Rider and The Hired Hand provide important structural elements. In Easy Rider the montage sequences take place against the shifting backdrop of Billy and Wyatt’s motorcycle journey, as California gives way to the mesas of New Mexico and the greenery of the South, each transition accompanied by a different rock song, the shifting land- and soundscapes mirroring the modulations of perpetual flight. The montage sequences in The Hired Hand recurrently employ stings of Bruce Langhorne’s score, suggesting an inexorable return to some kind of earlier state. The visual content of the montage sequences dwells not on the excitement of cross-country travel as in Easy Rider, but on the experience of day-to-day activities on the farm. While The Hired Hand does feature some early montage sequences of Harry and Arch making their way on horseback to Harry’s homestead, Fonda’s lengthy cross-fades and the relatively unhurried pace of horseback transit contrast with the dynamism of Hopper’s crosscutting, Kovács’s zooms, and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.”
Bruce Langhorne, the musician selected by Fonda to score The Hired Hand, is one of the more intriguing figures of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s. An African American in a predominantly white musical milieu, Langhorne inspired Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and played the electric guitar lead on the recording of that song, along with several other songs from Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album (1965). Langhorne also played with such figures as Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary, and on the earlier Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album (1963). The Easy Rider soundtrack lacks stylistic unity, ranging from the electrified Americana of The Byrds and The Band to the more unhinged psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix and The Electric Prunes, giving the impression of a sampling of FM radio circa 1969 (which is precisely how many of these songs came to occupy the soundtrack, with Hopper retaining tracks originally used for a temporary edit when they proved a good fit).11 By contrast, Langhorne’s score for The Hired Hand displays concerted uniformity. Each of its short tracks begins with a single, simple musical figure, usually played on either acoustic guitar or banjo, which repeats, unchanging, throughout the duration of the piece, as new melodies and instruments (fiddle, flute, sitar, etc.) are gradually layered on top.12 Drawing on a range of musical styles from country, folk, bluegrass, and blues, Langhorne’s entirely instrumental score is minimal, understated, and emotionally resonant, and would become something of a sought-after collector’s item, being reissued on vinyl in a limited, hand-numbered edition by boutique record label Scissor Tail in 2012.13
Where Hopper’s soundtrack for Easy Rider allowed maximal avenues of cross-promotion by repackaging a wide variety of commercially successful pop songs, The Hired Hand’s score carefully crafts a subdued, understated soundtrack that accompanies Fonda’s vision of an unhurried return to a pastoral life. The absence of vocals on the tracks lends a sense of anonymity to the music that reflects Langhorne’s essentially marginal role as a session musician for many better-known folk musicians. In contrast to Hopper’s rambunctious Easy Rider soundtrack as a principal source of commercial exploitation for that film, Langhorne’s score to The Hired Hand lacked obviously marketable prospects and was unlikely to attract a sizable audience to the film; in fact, Fonda had to fight Universal to employ the musician because the studio was concerned about his lack of prior motion picture experience.14
Themes and Tone
Langhorne’s score is eminently successful in conjuring and underscoring the subdued, introspective tone of Fonda’s film, providing the emotional counterpoint to its themes: yielding to the passage of time and the sensations of the world and attempting to mend damaged relationships (within the family unit, and ritually, between men), continuing to live under the shadow of mortality and the foreknowledge that death is inevitable. The opening sequence of The Hired Hand conjures a somewhat misleading tone of menace and death, as Harry and Arch encounter the body of a young girl floating in the river where they are at play. This portentous, ominous opening is intensified by the deliberate relegation of the corpse to offscreen space. The body is never actually shown on-screen, allowing the presence of death to take on the all-encompassing, spectral quality of an omen. This morbid opening stretch stands at odds with the warm tone of much of the rest of the film, which is primarily concerned with Harry’s attempts to mend his damaged relationship with Hannah. However, in the Old West the prospect of violent death is never far away. Fonda often withholds the sight of the act of violence itself and focuses on its consequences, such as when Griffen, bleeding from a gunshot wound in his neck, unexpectedly intrudes upon a jovial moment between Harry and Arch in McVey’s tavern and expires on the floor. The nonspecific totem of death in the form of the unseen corpse at the start of the film forms a neat symmetry with Harry’s death at its conclusion.
This fatalistic, existential element of The Hired Hand may have been influenced by the Gospel According to Thomas, the noncanonical Gnostic text that obsessed Hopper while he was making The Last Movie, and which also exerted a fascination over Fonda during the production of his film.15 Oates stated that Fonda envisioned The Hired Hand as a kind of illustration of the gospel’s themes, striving to depict “how little man cares for his environment, that passing through on earth he does not pay attention to the pollution of the rivers or the air we breathe. That man considers he is more important than the tree next to him.”16 Fonda planned the opening of his film as an evocation and exploration of these nebulous themes, invoking the elemental to firmly establish the terrestrial realm in which the film takes place: “We used the four classical elements and signs of the zodiac—earth, air, fire and water, going from one to the other in slow motion, until finally, from the water—the water from which life first came—comes a man.”17 Shortly afterward, the corporeal manifestation of death itself moves through these primordial waters, suggesting the inevitable end that awaits at the expiration of our days in this elemental realm.
Fonda’s performance is a continuation of his introverted, quasi-spiritual realization of Wyatt in Easy Rider. The Hired Hand represents its protagonist’s concerted attempt to return to a harmonious state: within the family unit, upon the earth, and within the terrestrial, temporal process of being itself. One can find the kernel of Fonda’s vision for The Hired Hand, and his characterization in it, from the moment in Easy Rider when Wyatt cryptically and impassively takes in the visage of the earth from the precipice at the commune. As both director and actor, Fonda approached The Hired Hand as an opportunity to bring a new degree of naturalism to his work. Hoberman labels his performance “enigmatic and withholding.”18 The question at the narrative crux of the film, “What if she’s married?,” is muttered by Arch to Harry at the sixteen-minute mark of the film and is almost lost amid cross-fades from close-ups of Fonda’s and Oates’s faces to shots of their silhouettes against the campfire and the sunset.
As visual lyricism threatens to overwhelm narrative drama, Fonda’s directorial style anticipates the signature style of another key figure who would soon emerge in the New Hollywood: Terrence Malick. Like Malick, Fonda uses music and montage to create an impressionistic sense of the totality of his cinematic world, often suppressing character psychology and motivation in the process. In this campfire sequence, the stirrings of Langhorne’s score and the judicious length of the cross-fades as the camera lingers on the faces, campfire, and sunset do not ascribe a higher degree of dramatic significance to any single narrative element of the scene. Narratively, Arch’s question about Hannah’s fidelity during his period of absence is a key plot point, but the obtrusive music and leisurely cross-fades and shots of the campfire and sunset invest the scene with a sense of rapturous resignation rather than a drive to propel the narrative forward. Were Sharp’s screenplay to have been realized in a more Classical Hollywood style, this single line would have been weighted as an important narrative point, driving Harry’s return to his ranch property and his reunion with Hannah, thus arriving at the central conflict of the film’s narrative: how Harry is to reintegrate with Hannah’s household (the conflict with the genuine antagonist, McVey, upon his subsequent reappearance is more of a deus ex machina designed to deliver the film to its inevitable conclusion: Harry’s death). Malick utilizes similar techniques in both of his 1970s films, but particularly Days of Heaven, which frequently turns its attention from the trivial concerns of its protagonists to take in rapturous montage sequences depicting the indifference of nature and the passage of time. A common criticism from Malick’s detractors is the way in which the lyrical nature of these montage sequences completely overwhelms the thin, psychologically undeveloped characterizations of his protagonists.19 The naturalism that Fonda strives for in his direction and performance in The Hired Hand similarly contrasts with his ostentatious cross-fade sequences, demonstrating Oates’s observation of the folly in “man consider[ing] he is more important than the tree next to him.”
Genre and Revisionism
Fonda’s pursuit of naturalism was an extension of his desire to demystify the western genre. This was a key theme of Sharp’s screenplay, and his broader body of screenwriting work throughout the 1970s reveals a consistent revision of generic convention, from the abstracted, death-obsessed transcontinental drive of The Last Run, which he envisioned as a recontextualization of the western, to the indiscriminate bloodletting of Ulzana’s Raid, which manages to eclipse The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, and Soldier Blue in the sheer scale of its misanthropy. Sharp retrospectively classified Night Moves as “an attempt to use the classic detective format, the private eye, and then set him in a landscape in which he was unable to solve the case.”20 Similarly, Sharp’s screenplay for The Hired Hand brings a degree of contemporary realism to the western setting by exploring the domestic environment and demythologizing the romanticism of the wandering cowboy archetype by showing the familial consequences of the itinerant lifestyle. Producer William Hayward stated: “Our image of the west has been conditioned by countless television and motion picture versions -and it just didn’t happen that way. In The Hired Hand, we felt we had a story that had more legality [?] in it than any western I had ever read. These characters weren’t gunfighters, they were drifters, or as the sheriff calls them, ‘travellin’ men.’ There are strong relevancies to today’s troubled times and the people involved.”21
By attempting to instill The Hired Hand with a clear sense of realism and reappraise representations of the family unit in the generic mold, Fonda also hoped to avoid some of the misappraisals of Easy Rider. In seeking to rebuild an estranged family unit at a time when Hollywood was still attempting to court the youth-cult market with depictions of generational schisms, youthful alienation, and familial collapse, Fonda’s Hired Hand was bucking the trend. Just as Hopper would later deny that Easy Rider ever intentionally glamorized the lives of its protagonists, Fonda was reportedly uncomfortable that those characters had been elevated to a heroic stature by fans of the film.22 While promoting The Hired Hand, Fonda betrayed various sources of personal discomfort, complaining that young people “have categorized me as a junkie and that’s the sort of film they expect” and stipulating in advance of his press appearances that he would “not do an interview which requires him to wear a suit, tie or jacket and [also would] not discuss his actress-sister Jane Fonda or his actor-father Henry Fonda.”23 Cochran believes that with The Hired Hand Fonda, clearly conscious of his image, sought “to correct the message many had mistakenly drawn from Easy Rider and the spate of road movies that followed in its wake, especially concerning the rootlessness of modern life and the freedom of life on the road.”24
Continuing Easy Rider’s western revisionism (in which California no longer represents the end point of westward expansion, but rather the starting point for an eastward-bound journey to pleasures unknown in New Orleans), The Hired Hand also begins with a vacillation around California, which Harris mentions as a potential destination early in the film and is the suggested location of the Collings homestead. Where Easy Rider’s journey promised debauchery funded by ill-gotten gains, Harry’s return home in The Hired Hand is prompted by a desire for familial reconciliation and the reestablishment of a stable domestic base. Early dialogue intimates that the melancholy mood that perpetually haunts Harry stems from his preoccupation with his guilt over the family he left not long after his wedding. There are some similarities here with contemporaneous youth-cult movies Five Easy Pieces and Adam at 6 A.M., including extended montage sequences depicting the protagonist attempting to subsume his identity in the processes of physical labor; all of these films feature alienated protagonists partially reintegrating with estranged family units, but it is Harry’s effort that is most sustained and sincerely intended, and The Hired Hand lacks the snarky depictions of class division featured in both Five Easy Pieces and Adam. Oates said of the film that he respected Fonda for “showing . . . the family as an ideal unit,” giving the film a conservative undercurrent that is largely lacking from the generally liberal-minded (and occasionally politically incoherent) New Hollywood/counterculture/youth-cult cycle of films.25
Violence and Death
As in Easy Rider, the violent conclusion of The Hired Hand squares the film’s moral ledger. Having reestablished his relationship with Hannah, Harry is forced to choose whether he will remain in the decent family life he has worked hard to rebuild or act on his loyalty to his traveling companion when Arch’s life is threatened. There is a ritual element to the conclusion, as Harry returns to his gunfighting ways. Once he makes his choice, abandoning his family again, it is inevitable that he will not return. The gunfighter Harry is slain at Del Norte, his devotion to violence ending his life and defusing the tension of his strained reunion with Hannah.
The Hired Hand’s depiction of violence contrasts with most other revisionist westerns of the period. Such films as Little Big Man, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (dir. Robert Altman, Warner Bros., 1971), Soldier Blue, and Ulzana’s Raid followed the lead of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, dwelling on copious, repetitious images of bloodletting elongated through the use of slow motion, which often had the ambivalent effect of aestheticizing and rendering picturesque the image of violence, rather than condemning it. Cochran observes that while Fonda does use slow motion “in his sweeping, panoramic views of the landscape and his close-ups of actors’ faces, especially the fascinating faces of Warren Oates and Verna Bloom,” he relegates acts of violence to offscreen space or depicts them matter of factly “at regular camera speed,” with the resulting “juxtaposition of the movie’s slow pace and the periodic spasms of violence serv[ing] to make the violence anything but aesthetic.”26 In this regard, Fonda’s treatment of violence is actually closer to the unsensational procedural style of Siegel’s Dirty Harry than it is to the prevailing revisionist western mode of the early 1970s. Fonda himself indicated his intentions in an interview with Cochran, stating that in The Hired Hand he “wanted the violence to be unacceptable and unexpected.”27
Figure 11.1. “The revenge he craves!” The poster for The Hired Hand suggests a much bloodier western than Fonda’s film.
The Hired Hand ends with Arch returning to the Collings homestead. The narrative significance of this gesture is left unexplained: Does Arch intend to simply inform Hannah of Harry’s death, or instead attempt to assume Harry’s place within the family unit? Cochran believes that “the conclusion, in which Arch, who has no roots, gives up wandering to return to the closest approximation of a family he has ever known, represents Fonda’s final renunciation of the idea that with Easy Rider he advocated dropping out and hitting the road.”28 Where the violent end of Easy Rider offers a morally inevitable rupturing of generic coherence, the ending of The Hired Hand actually fulfills the ritual functions of the western genre, with the sacrificial figure of the lone gunfighter a long-standing narrative archetype.
What of the Women of the West?
While the refutation of ritualized violence in the western (or at least directors paying lip service to such an intention) was to be expected in the revisionist cycle, the major contribution of The Hired Hand and, indeed, the aspect of the screenplay that first caught Fonda’s attention, is its psychologically realized portrayal of the life of a woman in the Old West.29 With Fonda’s Harry seemingly locked in a blissful existential muddle for much of the film, and Oates’s Arch left deliberately undeveloped, it is only Bloom’s Hannah who takes on the stature of a believable, three-dimensional character. The Hired Hand finds here its starkest contrast to Hopper’s first two films. The New Hollywood moment has never been regarded as a high point for female roles; in fact, many have retrospectively identified it as a clear nadir for women in the history of Hollywood. Molly Haskell named the era “the most disheartening in screen history.”30 Hopper’s first two films consistently display a misogynistic streak. The only female characters depicted in Easy Rider are unspeaking or monosyllabic and entirely without psychological development, occupying roles of clear subservience, be it domestic (the rancher’s wife and the women in the commune who serve Billy and Wyatt food) or sexual (the skinny-dipping women at the commune, the fawning girls in the café, and the prostitutes in New Orleans), while the major female characters in The Last Movie are Maria, an avaricious financial drain on Hopper’s Kansas, who becomes the target of his domestic violence, and the mindlessly sex-crazed Mrs. Anderson.
Even a cursory survey of the films considered in this book reveals a marked absence of robust female roles. Five Easy Pieces at least provides the greatest number of female parts, yet Bobby Dupea comes to despise Rayette, whom he considers his intellectual inferior. Catherine, his intellectual equal, shifts from an object of sexualized desire to the adversarial target of his own tightly wound insecurities, while Bobby’s sister is shuffling and socially inept. In Adam at 6 A.M. Adam’s love for Jerri Jo turns to contempt just as quickly; in Vanishing Point, Gilda Texter’s character, credited as “nude rider,” appears naked astride a motorcycle, a vision that, in Haskell’s words, “unfortunately, does not turn out to be a mirage”; and Lauren Hutton makes a similarly unclothed entrance in Little Fauss and Big Halsy, before becoming the object of a sexual tug of war between the titular characters.31 Laurie Bird finds herself in a more chaste version of the same love triangle in Two-Lane Blacktop. Bird’s character is at least one of the more interesting women in this body of films, if only because Hellman incorporates Bird’s personal idiosyncrasies into the role while withholding expository information, in the process posing more question than he answers. The French Connection depicts Popeye Doyle cruising for anonymous sex with far younger women. The only major female role in Dirty Harry is Chico’s concerned wife—and there is a variety of nude bodies glimpsed in strip clubs and paraded before curiously open windows late at night.
In her landmark feminist film text, From Reverence to Rape (1974), Molly Haskell observes that in the 1960s and 1970s the prevailing female characterization was “villainess, a conformist waiting patiently or clutching impatiently to bring the [male] hero back into the fold, to reintegrate him into the hypocritical society whose emissary she is.”32 If The Graduate is the prototypical film of this type, it is a device that reappears in Five Easy Pieces, Adam at 6 A.M., and The Last Movie. Of the youth-cult road movie cycle, Haskell writes that “the women are lucky to be mere bodies, way stations where the heroes can relieve themselves and resume their journey,” an observation that applies to Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, Five Easy Pieces, Little Fauss and Big Halsy, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Two-Lane Blacktop.33
Just as Fonda hoped to revise the glorification of youth-cult nihilism with The Hired Hand, in his desire to explore the experience of womanhood in the west he was also resisting the prevailing characterization of inane, mindless women that recurs throughout Easy Rider and its progeny. Although Fonda’s film begins with Harry Collings’s decision to end his wandering ways and return to his family, Hannah receives him frostily, marking a shift in the dramatic structure of the film as the source of emotional and dramatic conflict in the narrative is relocated, and the film invokes the question of whether or not Hannah will accept Harry’s return. Fonda’s Harry, like his Wyatt, is a one-dimensional character who carries an aura of mystique that is largely conveyed through the withholding of backstory, limited dialogue, and lack of psychological development. His reasons for leaving his family in the first place, as well as the state of their relationship at the time of his departure, are left unexplored beyond cursory expository dialogue, so the audience may only guess at Harry’s motivations at any point in the film.
Hannah, on the other hand, is explored in far greater detail, and Bloom’s performance becomes the emotional anchor of the film. Where Harry’s choice to first abandon and then return to his family is afforded no more narrative significance than mere whims, Hannah’s monologues about her experiences in Harry’s absence are weighted with a solemn importance, establishing that it is not Harry but Hannah who is the film’s tragic central figure. Hannah has been wounded by her abandonment and has formed both a steely resilience and an emotional detachment from her situation during the years spent running the homestead and raising their young child in isolation. The film is disarmingly frank in its treatment of Hannah’s sexual desires. Although Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1971) was lauded in the same year for its unheralded, sexually explicit dialogue, in retrospect its leering, sneering nastiness is readily apparent, whereas The Hired Hand addresses sex and a woman’s sexuality with understatement. Harry’s furious reaction upon learning of Hannah’s unfaithfulness during his years of absence is truly disproportionate to his abandonment of her in the first place, but Sharp’s screenplay and Fonda’s direction have the sensitivity to demonstrate how visibly conflicted Hannah is by her determination “to continue to satisfy her sexual needs and do so on her own terms,” and, on the other hand, the “psychic costs” of meeting those desires.34 Not only isolated from her husband, but also as a result shunned by the community in which she lives, Hannah’s tragedy is identified by Cochran: “Hannah is not a late twentieth-century feminist transplanted into the old West. She is, rather, a product of the cultural and personal experiences drawn from living on the outskirts of a small, frontier town in the late nineteenth century. She did not want to be a self-sufficient, independent woman, but circumstances forced her to become one, successfully managing the farm for seven years without the support from her husband or the townspeople. Still, she yearns for a stable relationship with her husband.”35
In contrast to the heavy psychological, social, and sexual dilemmas surrounding Hannah’s character, Fonda’s Harry is positively lightweight. There are also stark differences in the representation of each character. Verna Bloom’s Hannah is not made up and is typically unglamorously shot. Her visage suggests the hardships and difficult living conditions of the era, while Fonda’s shaggy-haired, movie-star good looks are imported intact from Easy Rider, his character looking attractively weathered but far less haggard than would be expected given the arduous life on the road experienced in both films. Hoberman cites a scene in which the camera dwells fetishistically on Harry bathing before having sex with Hannah, in which Fonda’s “longhaired, bearded, narrow-hipped Harry is the resident sex object” of The Hired Hand.36 Molly Haskell dubs this mode of representation as central to the rise of the “feminized male” in the films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as male stars “appropriated characteristics that once attached to movie heroines: the glamour, the sensitivity, the coyness, the narcissism, the purity, the passivity, the self pity.”37 A new generation of male stars usurped female roles with trademark gestures of “gentle sensitiv[ity]” and “fumbling gestures of androgyny,” displacing female stardom.38 In turn, female sexuality was relegated to the sexpot parts of films such as Easy Rider. Bloom’s appearance in The Hired Hand represented a new, unglamorous school of female depiction that was beginning to open up.39
Fonda
If Fonda is to be commended for exhibiting the courage to depict a real, three-dimensional female character with complex sexual desires in Bloom’s Hannah, he is equally open to criticism for the narcissism of his mode of self-representation. Hopper displayed similar hubris by positioning himself so prominently in The Last Movie, inevitably helping to fuel the backlash that film received. It is also likely that the perceived arrogance of Fonda’s starring in his directorial debut set the tone for the way many critics approached The Hired Hand. These sentiments are visible in Robert B. Frederick’s Variety interview with Fonda. Frederick editorializes on Fonda’s “irritating snobbism or condescension when he treats the journalist as beneath him. . . . He [Fonda] also self-appreciates the incongruity of his standard sloppy appearance . . . against the posh surroundings of his Regency Hotel suite (‘Hell, Universal’s paying me more for this [the promotion tour] than they did for making the film’)—a comment known in the industry as the ‘hey, look at me dad’ syndrome.”40 Arthur Murphy’s Variety forecast of the film’s commercial prospects begins, “The Hired Hand doesn’t work very well,” and proceeds to criticize its “disjointed story, a largely unsympathetic hero, and an obtrusive amount of cinematic gimmickry which renders inarticulate the confused story subtleties.”41 Critics were more split on The Hired Hand than they were about The Last Movie. An advertisement for Fonda’s film appeared in Take One magazine quoting praise from Roger Greenspun’s New York Times review, calling the film “sensitive . . . an ambitious movie with fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning, rising to the mystical . . . exciting . . . the images are absolutely ravishing.” Jerry Parker in Newsday wrote: “An auspicious debut for Peter Fonda, film director. . . . Miss Bloom, who was so excellent in Medium Cool, here gives another sensitive performance that is just as lovely to watch. Oates . . . will probably make the transition to genuine stardom on the strength of this performance.”42
It may well be that these were the only positive reviews studio publicists could find (and Greesnpun’s ambiguous qualifier “fairly elaborate technique” indicates his own praise was not unequivocal). Many other reviewers identified positive elements in otherwise generally negative pieces; overall, Filmfacts logged five favorable reviews, ten negative, and one mixed.43 Charles Champlin wrote in the L.A. Times that “Oates comes to dominate the movie by natural energy and credibility of his performance,” but his prevailing stance on the film was that while “there are moments of considerable if irrelevant beauty . . . there are other moments when The Hired Hand begins to feel like the only feature ever made entirely in slow motion. It is cinematography gone mad, an endless succession of double and triple images gauzily superimposed and shifting and fading and lingering.”44 Likewise, Roger Ebert noted “a succession of shimmering photographic images, slow dissolves, sunstruck double-exposures and camera work that seems lyrical for a Western. The Hired Hand is a very quiet movie, for that matter, drawing on the detached mysticism that Peter Fonda always seems to exude.”45 In his measured but ultimately negative review, Ebert’s central criticism stems from his inability to comfortably situate the film within the established generic parameters of the western and youth-cult cycle:
The Hired Hand doesn’t pay off for audiences looking for a Western. Although good Westerns have always been morality plays, most of them have arrived at morality after a journey through a violent and action-oriented story. That doesn’t happen here; the villain simply kidnaps the best friend, and announces he will cut off one of Oates’ fingers every week until Fonda comes to rescue him. This leads to a foredoomed confrontation and to a death that is as inevitable as the deaths at the end of Easy Rider.
Fonda and Dennis Hopper popularized the masochistic death-of-the-hero ending in Easy Rider, and since then it has become conventional in a certain sort of youth movie. The Idea is that death, by its awesome finality, casts a significant light on the everyday events that went before.
Well, it does to a degree, but usually what happens is a sort of metaphysical overkill, and we’re left sitting in the theatre wishing the hero had gathered his rosebuds while he could. Throwing in a death at the end of a movie is getting to be less significant and more cheap, I think; in the hands of more thoughtful directors, everyday events have their own human meanings and don’t need to be gussied up by Christ symbolism.46
Ebert’s review clearly indicates his exhaustion with the kind of perfunctory death that had become the standard conclusion to the youth-cult movies from Easy Rider through Vanishing Point. Amid the declining commercial fortunes of this cycle of films, and in the wake of the largely negative and indifferent reviews, Universal pulled The Hired Hand from distribution almost immediately, letting it play for only a week in the United States and barely giving it a chance to recoup its costs and establish an audience.47 Universal seems to have been a particularly grievous culprit in this regard, showing a similar lack of patience with such youth-oriented titles as Taking Off (dir. Milos Forman), Two-Lane Blacktop, and Minnie and Moskowitz (dir. John Cassavetes) in the same year that it pulled the plug on The Hired Hand and The Last Movie. Universal, and Ned Tanen in particular, overzealously rushed more titles into production than other studios in their eagerness to capitalize on the youth-movie boom and were equally quick to discard the same films when they fared less than favorably at the box office. Unlike The Last Movie, The Hired Hand was afforded a brief publicity tour in Europe, but this was marred by repeated technical problems, prompting Universal to decide against pursuing a release there and effectively ending the theatrical run of The Hired Hand, which never made back its $1.2 million budget.48
Seemingly too straight for the youth-cult set and too affected by the stigma of Fonda’s youth-cult persona and affectations (no matter how keen he was to dispel them) for mainstream critics, The Hired Hand’s fidelity to western conventions was eclipsed by Fonda’s star persona. This prompted critics to read the film not as an entry in the western genre, but rather as a belated grab at the flagging youth-cult cycle that Fonda was attempting to distance himself from even as the backlash was beginning to be felt. In retrospect, Fonda’s film represents a yin to Hopper’s yang; where Hopper ostentatiously set out to challenge cinematic convention itself in The Last Movie, Fonda wanted to revise the myths at the basis of the western genre while being careful not to exceed the parameters of the genre’s conventions.
Overshadowed by the torrent of hatred that was directed at Hopper’s film upon its release, in the intervening decades The Hired Hand has enjoyed little of the serious academic reappraisal that has been extended to The Last Movie, but it has been released on DVD and is occasionally shown on late-night television, courtesies that have yet to be extended to Hopper’s divisive passion project. The Hired Hand has nurtured a small cult audience and some degree of goodwill but is unlikely to ever transcend its humble position in the shadow of Hopper’s more impetuous works. Given the full resources of the studio to make whatever film he wanted, Fonda’s Hired Hand is the kind of small, personal film that is supposedly the very stuff of the New Hollywood. While its prominent use of cross-fades led many critics to leap to accusations of drugginess and post–Easy Rider derivativeness, in its nostalgic tone, generic coherence, and small-scale ambition, it is actually far closer to Bogdanovich’s celebrated Last Picture Show than it is to Hopper’s Last Movie. Thus far, however, The Hired Hand has been afforded little more significance than that of a footnote whenever the films of that era are collectively appraised, being too small and too understated to warrant consideration alongside the grand auteurist gestures that would be enshrined in the New Hollywood auteurist canon.