You can still see the craters The Hired Hand (screens Saturday, October 25 at the Dryden) left in some theaters back when it was originally released in 1971.  Peter Fonda's directorial debut, a Western about a man returning home to his family after spending seven years on the road, didn't play well to audiences who equated the genre with the likes of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.  Instead, Hand featured precious little gunplay, a surprisingly strong female character and tons of thoughtful, reflective moments.

Now that Hand has been restored, people are beginning to realize it got a bum rap back in the day.  In fact, Hand reminded me a lot of Vincent Gallo's Cannes bomb The Brown Bunny, in terms of both its content and its inability to be immediately accessible. Both films are about men traveling across the country (in different directions, however) to see the women they love, though Fonda's Harry Collings isn't alone when he finally lands on the doorstep of wife Hannah (Verna Bloom, who will be here to introduce the film).  In tow is Harry's pal Arch (Warren Oates), who casually asks Hannah why she doesn' t have a dog.  "Had one, but he ran away," she frigidly says, "Never bothered to get another."

Harry is troubled by rumors about Hannah hiring men to plow her fields – in both senses of the term – but is even more disturbed when Hannah freely admits to bedding the men she has occasionally hired to pick up the slack in his absence.  And Hannah doesn't budge one bit as she offers her husband the same cold treatment given to the men who came before him.

Hand, though sporadically dogged by some odd freeze frames and double exposures, is hazily shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, an Oscar winner for Close Encounters.  It also features a dreamy Bruce Langhorne score I only wish was available somewhere for purchase.

1:37 –

for western violence and some sexual content