One from the heart
One of the best films at this year’s festival is also one of the oldest
PREVIEW
THE HIRED HAND
Starring Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Robert Pratt and Verna Bloom
Written and directed by Peter Fonda
Calgary International Film Festival
Saturday, October 5
Uptown Screen
Upon discovering a work of art virtually ignored by the mainstream, it’s easy to fall for the naive idea that the piece will somehow, someday manage to garner the attention it deserves. In film, there are few examples of works that, having quickly disappeared from empty theatres decades earlier, return to the cinema completely reconsidered and revitalized. Alongside the oeuvre of Orson Welles (which, in essence, has always existed in a state of after-the-fact revival), and the "brilliant accidents" of the B-movie industry, rests a new addition to the library of "rediscovered" classics: Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand.
In the wake of Easy Rider, Fonda could have done anything he wanted to. When he opted to create a quietly introspective and movingly lyrical western, the film limped through an extremely limited two-week run in North America, exiled to the memory of the few who lucked out and saw it in the theatre or in a chopped-up edition on late-night television. Made two decades before Unforgiven, The Hired Hand is a pitch-perfect revisionist western, and it arrives fully restored at the Calgary International Film Festival as one of the brightest spots on the entire schedule.
Influenced in equal parts by John Ford’s 1946 masterwork My Darling Clementine (starring none other than Peter’s father Henry) and a fondness for post-war Japanese cinema, Fonda’s directorial debut seems like a film by an aging master, rather than one by a raging young man best known as Easy Rider's counter-cultural biker icon Captain America. On the phone from Los Angeles, Fonda describes the plot in abstracts: "Warren (Oates) plays wisdom. I play ignorance and attitude, and Bobby Pratt played innocence. Innocence gets killed first. It was a western in the traditional form, but not with a traditional story. No one had seen this from a woman’s point of view before – what it means to have a cowboy for a husband."
After drifting the open range for seven years with his long-time compatriot Arch (Oates), they enlist the new kid, Dan (Robert Pratt), and Harry Collings (Fonda) suddenly feels an irresistible desire to return home to his wife Hannah (a brilliant turn by Verna Bloom) and daughter Janey (Megan Denver). At the announcement of Harry’s plans, Arch comments, "Home – maybe there ain’t no such colour." Harry responds, "Home is just a place you start from. It’s just a waste living like this."
Yet when Harry arrives home, Hannah isn’t quite so eager to welcome him back, agreeing only to let him stay on as a hired hand. While a pre-existing conflict with the crooked McVey (Severn Darden) acts itself out on the surface, it’s Harry’s relationship with Hannah that determines his fate. Midway between Peckinpah and Ozu, and built upon astonishing visuals by Vilmos Zsigmond (while only his first film as cinematographer, this may be the most beautiful western ever) and the layered editing of Frank Mazzola (images float overtop one another, turning each dissolve into an abstract work of art) The Hired Hand is a modern masterpiece.
Besides impressing a small number of rabid fans, The Hired Hand also allowed Fonda access to his personal directorial heroes – Kon Ichikawa (best known for his documentary of the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo Olympiad) was particularly impressed, and invited Fonda to a meeting in Japan.
"Through an interpreter, he asked me how old I was when I directed The Hired Hand, and I said I was 30 – we were sitting around this fountain in the middle of Toho Studios in Tokyo, and he almost fell in," says Fonda. "He said, ‘I’ve been making movies about women for my entire career and I can’t touch that. How did you know so much about women and you were only 30?’"
Despite its preliminary disappointments, Fonda has remained forever proud of The Hired Hand, and is often quoted as saying that he hopes the film will be considered as his epitaph, and his excitement is well-deserved. But how does a slow-moving, obtuse western fit into today’s action-driven film climate?
"People are getting tired of the MTV approach," says Fonda. "You have to get rid of the artifice and find moments and fill them. There’s thousands of them in The Hired Hand for people to discover – be it Verna Bloom, the photography, the costumes, or even the lighting, and for that, I’m glad The Hired Hand is out there. Wherever it goes, in essence I’m there, too – I am The Hired Hand and it’s a work from my heart. I think it’s perfect and it fits right in."
In one of the few reviews from The Hired Hand's original theatrical run, Gene Shalit raved, "In 20 or 30 years, Peter Fonda is going to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I directed that.’" Despite The Hired Hand's deserved critical resurgence, Fonda still sounds most proud of one reaction in particular. "When my father saw it, so many years later, his only comment was, ‘Now that’s my kind of western.’"
Fonda's new re-edit not quite so new after all
Following the disappearance of The Hired Hand from North American screens, Peter Fonda and Warren Oates accompanied the film through the European film festival circuit, attending each screening with a film splicer under Fonda’s arm. Fonda recalls, "I brought a small editing splicer to all the theatres The Hired Hand played in Europe to fix one moment in particular – a little push-in of Harry hammering up a note around town, outlining no further need for hired help at the ranch. Warren and I would walk up to the production booth – me with long hair and a full beard, looking like a wild man, people thinking about Charlie Manson. I’d have to talk my way in – ‘I directed it, I basically paid for it, and it’s my film! I’m the guy!’ – and we’d cut out that God damned push-in."
In the age of Director's Cuts that pack on the extra footage, the more compact edition of The Hired Hand is a refreshing (slightly shorter) breath of air. |
