The Hired Hand (1971)

Home. Maybe there ain't no such colour.

Easy Rider was 1969’s big surprise hit, bringing in $60m against a $400,000 budget. It was a return on investment that none of the major studios could afford to ignore. At Universal, newly-minted VP of Production Ned Tanen was tasked with encouraging new filmmakers – particularly those involved with Easy Rider – to replicate the movie’s success, offering small budgets but full creative control. Tanen would be instrumental in producing Milos Forman’s first American film Taking Off (1971) and former effects technician Douglas Trumbull’s directorial debut Silent Running (1972), but his prime targets were Easy Rider’s two young stars: Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. While Hopper would test the limits of both creative control and the studio’s patience with his solipsistic folly The Last Movie (1971), Fonda – ever the more traditional and contemplative of the duo – had something else in mind, a gentle western called The Hired Hand (1971).

Fonda and producer Bill Hayward had come across Alan Sharp’s spec script during post-production on Easy Rider. According to Fonda, the story of “a man who had deserted his wife and infant daughter, leaving them to fend for themselves while he wanders the western lands with a friend and no purpose” hit close to home.¹ The Easy Rider shoot had put incredible strain on his first marriage to Susan Brewer (they would divorce in 1974) and the film’s unparalleled success left Fonda struggling with his sudden fame, as well as the creeping suspicion that he had embarrassed his father. The Hired Hand was an opportunity to define himself as something other than a joint-smoking biker dropout, as well as tell a story that would make Henry Fonda proud.

Sharp once described The Hired Hand as a “perfectly straightforward little story about a guy who fucked off and came back”, which is a blunt, if accurate, summary of the narrative: Harry Collings (Fonda) has spent the last seven years roaming the west with his pal Arch Harris (Warren Oates) after abandoning his wife Hannah (Verna Bloom) and their daughter. Now weary of his peripatetic existence, Harry decides to return and make amends. He and Arch agree to work as hired hands on the Collings farm to prove Harry’s commitment to the straight life, but their old lives comes back to haunt them with tragic consequences.

Though Sharp later complained that Fonda’s “languorous” style “never really matched the tale”, the opposite is actually true: Fonda’s directorial style actively complements and elevates the material, turning Sharp’s Caledonian laconism into lyricism, embellishing and expanding upon themes that Sharp would later detail in Bill Forsyth’s 1978 profile The Odd Man: the journey, the return, and troubled relationships that never seem to get better. “And the reason you fuck them up,” says Sharp, “is because of your ego, of you, of your person, the wish to be recognised for more than you are.”

These themes are at the very heart of The Hired Hand: Harry’s seven-year odyssey began with the selfish act of a twenty-year-old married to a woman ten years his senior and ends with the acceptance that life with her might have been hard, but it had some purpose. Like Easy Rider’s Wyatt, Harry can’t shake the idea that he “blew it”. In Sharp’s subsequent novelisation², Harry returns because of what appears to be a full-blown existential crisis, but Fonda – never an actor prone to hysteria – is more ambiguous in his performance. His Harry is a man sluggish with ennui, and he’s not the only one: his gang’s plan to retire to California is rapidly becoming a pipe dream, and the roughhewn optimism in Arch’s toothy grin no longer reaches his eyes. They are lost in Vilmos Zsigmond’s shimmering western landscape, dreaming without direction. And like a man without a compass, Harry wanders in ever decreasing circles until he arrives at the place where it all began. His return is fated, but reconciliation is impossible, foreshadowed by the floating corpse he’s forced to cut loose at the beginning of the film: “She’d have come to pieces in your hands the moment you started to pull her in.”

The inevitability of death hangs over The Hired Hand, but does not smother it. Sure, there are shoot-outs, but they are quickly ended. Fonda is too much of a humanist to allow the darkness to overwhelm. Instead, the film focuses on the relationships between the core trio, and at the centre of those relationships is Hannah Collings.

Verna Bloom was already an accomplished stage actress, replacing Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday in the Broadway revival of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, before Studs Terkel recommended her to Haskell Wexler for Medium Cool (1969), where she played an Appalachian mother caught up in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Her Hannah is a sun-hardened extension of that character, the kind of woman whose self-sufficiency was once a burden and is now a badge of honour. She is one of only two female characters in The Hired Hand, and the only one whose name isn’t hurled like an insult. Bloom makes the most of it, able to suggest a deep inner life with a minute change in expression – Fonda’s director’s commentary frequently falls into awed instruction to “watch her face” – as she portrays a wronged woman with no hint of victimhood. When confronted by Harry about her rumoured dalliances with previous hired hands, she explains her reasoning as a principled, sexually mature woman of thirty-seven. Despite her abiding affection for her hitherto absent husband, she needs to put him straight:

The tragedy of The Hired Hand lies in Harry’s inability to recognise his emotional immaturity, but the hope lies in Arch’s potential to step up in his absence. Warren Oates was always Fonda’s first choice: “I’d always watched him being misused, you know? I thought, this guy, there’s something very touching in his heart, and he’s perfect to play Arch, because Arch really is the romantic lead.” Oates brings occasional melancholy to an otherwise charmingly grizzled performance. Arch understands Harry’s yearning to return home as much as he worries about his young friend’s tendency towards self-destruction. In a deleted scene, Arch tries to dissuade Harry from taking revenge on the gang who murdered their partner. In another, he takes the blame for a saloon shoot-out and is forced to leave the farm.³

Arch understands that Harry will never grow while he’s around – as Hannah says, Arch is what Harry went looking for in the first place – and so his departure is necessary, painfully so, not least because it deprives Arch of the peace he craves with Hannah. The tragic irony is that Harry will never understand what that departure means or what Arch is sacrificing; he remains fundamentally blind to his own inadequacies. As per the Gospel of Thomas verse quoted earlier in the film, “the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.” Arch does see it – he has had a taste of that life with Hannah – and when he returns to the farm after Harry’s death, we hope that he can experience it again.

Henry Fonda was proud of his son’s film – “that’s my kind of western” – but Universal was less enthused, and struggled to find a cohesive marketing strategy, opting to misrepresent the film to appeal to the lowest common denominator. According to Fonda: “I remember Universal was going to put up a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, showing me without a shirt, wearing a cowboy hat and a pistol stuffed in my pants. The billboard was going to say something like ‘THAT EASY RIDER RIDES AGAIN!’ I went to Universal and said you take that down or I’ll take it down. I was prepared to take it down with explosives … Those assholes were trying to put my film in the fuckin’ toilet.” And they succeed. The Hired Hand lasted less than three weeks in cinemas before it was pulled, whereupon it languished in obscurity for the next thirty years.

Sharp wasn’t a fan of the film either, thinking it marred by Fonda and Co.’s on-set drug use and convinced that the ending didn’t make narrative sense. He would produce his own version of the story as a 1971 novelisation, which reinstated cut scenes and stripped the dream-like visuals back to simple statements of observation. While the novelisation does build upon the inner lives of the characters – the point of view skips between the central trio – it also removes a fair amount of ambiguity and interest, leaving the book narratively stronger, but emotionally wanting. It’s still a fine novel, but the film is an enigmatic masterpiece.

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Next Up: “He’s the world’s greatest ‘cannon’!”

1. Quotes from Fonda come from his director’s commentary (which is great) and his memoir Don’t Tell Dad, which is a bracingly candid read not just about his career, but his relationship with his father.

2. Sharp had a penchant for turning produced scripts into novels if he felt the material hadn’t been handled correctly. He did the same with Night Moves (1975).

3. It’s a fine scene, with a cracking turn from Larry Hagman as the town sheriff, but it dilutes Arch’s real reason for leaving - his growing attachment to Hannah.