October 12, 2003

From the Days When the Western Still Mattered

HAT'S my kind of western" was the reaction of Henry Fonda to "The Hired Hand," according to his son, Peter, who directed and starred in it. Thirty-two years after the film's initial theatrical release, Peter Fonda, speaking by phone from his Montana home, still sounds slightly amazed by his father's response to this odd, gentle, lyrical little picture, which seemed, at the time, to be almost nobody's kind of western: it wasn't hip enough for the younger Fonda's counterculture following, who probably expected something closer to the biker-outlaw epic "Easy Rider" (1969); it wasn't square enough for moviegoers of the elder Fonda's generation, who preferred the more straightforward storytelling — and morality — embodied by, say, "True Grit" (1969); it wasn't violent enough to satisfy devotees of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone; and it didn't have as many jokes as the synthetic pop western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969).

There is, by actual count, exactly one joke in "The Hired Hand." (And I won't spoil it here.) Mr. Fonda and his co-star, the great character actor Warren Oates, don't trade patter like Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Their characters, Harry (Mr. Fonda) and Arch, lack the dashing, devil-may-care quality of Butch and Sundance: they're just a couple of tired-looking trail bums trying to stay out of trouble. Like most of the best westerns of the period, "The Hired Hand" is a movie about coming to the end of the trail, and Mr. Fonda (working from a script by Alan Sharp) treats that subject with the gravity it deserves.

A restored print of the movie will play on the big screen at Cinema Village in Manhattan, starting Friday; a DVD release will follow shortly. Although Mr. Fonda's hopes are high, the film's chances for commercial success don't appear much brighter now than they were in 1971, when he was a star and the western was still a vital genre — nearing the end of its road, perhaps, but not giving up without a fight. "Unfortunately, westerns seem dated now," Mr. Fonda says, and it's becoming harder and harder to remember that the genre was, in the late 60's and early 70's, the main battleground in the war between the old Hollywood and the new American filmmaking.

To state it baldly, the war in Vietnam had generated in many Americans (not only the young) the impulse to question our national character, to look to the past for clues to who we are and who we should be. In movie terms, that usually meant hitching up the wagons and heading west.

What the new pioneers found there, out on the vanished frontier, was impressively various and almost invariably ambiguous: although the violence of life in the Old West was disturbing, the freedom and wildness and openness of it were intensely appealing. The heroes of the traditional westerns that were then being made as vehicles for older stars — John Wayne, James Stewart and, of course, Henry Fonda — were not the heroes of the younger generation. Instead of the town-taming marshals and the riding-to-the-rescue cavalry soldiers, people were interested in the outcasts and weirdos who roamed the territories: the bandits and drifters and dreamers in the songs of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, the Band.

"The Hired Hand" isn't, as the neo-western "Easy Rider" was, explicitly anti-authoritarian: in this picture's world, authority seems merely irrelevant. In the opening scene, Harry and Arch and a younger traveling companion, Dan (Robert Pratt), discover the body of a girl floating face down in a stream, and, though they're shaken, they just ride on. There's no law to report their find to, and probably no point even if there were; senseless death under the open sky is, we understand, something Harry and Arch have seen before. And when, not long after, Dan is killed, they don't go running to the law then, either. They wouldn't know where to look.

So they light out for the rural home Harry abandoned years earlier, in his restless youth, and get a justifiably chilly welcome from his wife, Hannah (Verna Bloom); she's not ready to take Harry back as her husband, but she agrees, grudgingly, to give the men space in the barn and to employ them as hired hands. And that's about all there is to the movie, until a messy climactic shootout — which settles, in a way, the question of where the end of each character's trail is going to be.

The question all of the era's serious westerns — from Monte Hellman's "Shooting" (1967) and "Ride in the Whirlwind"(1965), to Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch" (1969) and "Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970), to Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971), to Philip Kaufman's "Great Northfield, Minnesota, Raid" (1972) — is precisely that: where do we end up? And how did we get there? Asking that sort of question is bound to induce melancholy. The mood of those westerns is helplessly elegiac, and films set in the modern West, notably Peter Bogdanovich's "Last Picture Show" (1971) and Peckinpah's "Junior Bonner (1972), share that sense of loss.

In the extremely laconic "Hired Hand," the loss is implied rather than stated: we see it mostly in the way the characters look at one another — with the wariness that comes from not quite believing that peace and plain happiness are really possible. And back then, in the Nixonian darkness, people did desperately want to believe that, and hankered for utopias.

"The Hired Hand," in fact, comes perilously close to being a full-blown pastoral myth. Mr. Fonda lingers over the glorious landscapes that Harry and Arch ride through, and lingers, too, on close-up after close-up of Verna Bloom's weathered but beautiful face. Although Hannah is hardly the conventional "good woman" of western films — she's unapologetically sexual — and the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, lights her as if she were a goddess.

Mr. Fonda's film (his first as a director) is, in its eccentric fashion, as romantic a work as the genre has produced. Although Mr. Fonda swears that audiences over the years have been moved by "The Hired Hand" even at screenings of dreadful 16-millimeter prints ("Every time I saw one of those prints, I'd feel like killing myself," he says), the picture is, it seems to me, too fragile an idyll to survive even a glancing wound to its gorgeous flesh. It needed the makeover, because if you aren't seduced by its twilight look and its trancelike rhythms, you might reject it entirely. A mirage has to shimmer to be believed.

And this restored "Hired Hand" is worth seeing, as a weirdly pure example of the kind of western the new Hollywood gave us when the so-called movie generation took stock of its own, and its medium's, history: it drifts, but it drifts toward an ideal, a vision of home. Best of all, it's ornery. "The Hired Hand" is a picture that Wyatt, Mr. Fonda's "Easy Rider" character, would appreciate. It does its own thing in its own time.  

Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies."