The Hired Hand. 1971. USA. Directed by Peter Fonda. Screenplay by Alan Sharp. With Fonda, Warren Oates, Verna Bloom, Robert Pratt, Severn Darden. DCP. 93 min.
Peter Fonda’s directorial debut arrived in the same year as The Beguiled and Dirty Harry, both also at Universal, and bears little resemblance to either. The film opens with a sequence of overlapping, psychedelic dissolves—water, fire, riders in silhouette—that signals its intentions immediately: This is a Western organized around sensation and duration rather than incident. Harry Collings (Fonda) has been drifting for seven years with his friend Arch (Warren Oates). He returns to the wife (Verna Bloom) and daughter he abandoned, and she takes him back on the single condition that he come back as a hired hand, not a husband. The farm, the work, the distance she keeps—these become the film’s true subject.
Vilmos Zsigmond, shooting his first significant dramatic feature, renders the New Mexico landscape in a way that sits between documentary and reverie, using natural light, long slow fades, and a color palette running from ocher to deep shadow. His work with Fonda produces several sequences that abandon narrative coherence in favor of something closer to lyric poetry. Oates holds the film’s human center in his customary way—present, unpredictable, grounded—while Bloom’s Hannah, a woman who has built an entire life around her husband’s absence and must now renegotiate it, carries the film’s emotional weight with particular economy. Alan Sharp’s screenplay (he later wrote Ulzana’s Raid for Robert Aldrich) is a model of taciturn expressivity.