Violence, Feminism and the Counter Culture in Peter Fonda's 'The Hired Hand'

Film and History, Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 1994

In the late sixties Hollywood discovered the profitability of the growing culture of dissent. Through the success of such low-budget pictures as Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) and more mainstream films like Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), filmmakers found a large market for movies appealing to young, disaffected audiences. Such films not only challenged mainstream views of morality, but also traditional Hollywood methods of portraying sex and violence.

No actor represented the increasing influence of the counterculture in Hollywood more than Peter Fonda. Easy Rider (1969), his greatest success, was both a popular and critical phenomenon of proportions virtually unrivaled by any previous movie. The story of two drop-outs from mainstream culture, the film’s off-beat protagonists, casual acceptance of sex, and illegal drug use effectively captured the values of the burgeoning counterculture. Largely the creation of Fonda and Dennis Hopper, a pair of renegades from the Hollywood studio system, Easy Rider was made for $375,000 and, in the first fifteen years of its release, grossed more than $60 million.¹ Fonda and Hopper not only co-starred and, along with Terry Southern, co-authored the screenplay, but Fonda also served as producer while Hopper directed. The reverberations of Easy Rider’s success were felt throughout Hollywood as the studios shifted their emphasis from big-budget movies to smaller-scale productions aimed at college-educated audiences and giving a new, younger generation of directors its first opportunity to break into the industry.²

Fonda followed up the success of Easy Rider with The Hired Hand (1971), a Western which he directed and co-starred in with Warren Oates and Verna Bloom. But he was unable to strike a responsive chord with the public as he had with his previous movie. Made for only $1.2 million, the film failed even to earn back its costs³; despite a few positive reviews, overall it was not a critical success.⁴

In retrospect, Fonda probably was in a no-win situation. Many people had hated Easy Rider or were jealous of its success, and Fonda had made enemies in the movie industry. On the other hand, fans of Easy Rider were disappointed by The Hired Hand not only because it was so unlike its predecessor, but also because it rejected the values that seemingly had been endorsed by Easy Rider and the whole crop of counterculture movies of the late sixties and early seventies.

Despite its failure—or more precisely, because of it—The Hired Hand remains an important film for several reasons. By drawing on themes and symbols commonly associated with movies popular with counterculture audiences, Fonda worked to deconstruct many of the assumptions underlying these films. Fonda claimed, for instance, that many people had missed the point of Easy Rider by viewing the protagonists, Wyatt and Billy, as heroic figures they were not meant to be.⁵ Therefore, in The Hired Hand, he sought to correct the message many had mistakenly drawn from Easy Rider and the spate of road movies that followed in its wake, especially concerning the rootlessness of modern life and the freedom of life on the road.⁶ Second, the movie countered another important trend of late-sixties youth film—that of the glorification and eroticization of violence, as seen in such movies as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch (1969). Finally, through Bloom’s portrayal of Hannah Collings, Fonda created a strong, central female figure, making The Hired Hand, in his words, the first feminist Western.⁷ Coming from Hollywood’s major representative of the counterculture, and near the end of the decade—a period in which film critic Molly Haskell described as the nadir for women’s roles in films—the feminist nature of The Hired Hand stands in stark contrast, not only to the general trend of movies of the late sixties, but to the sexism of the counterculture and New Left generally.⁸

But, at the same time, The Hired Hand was part of a wave of new-style Westerns which self-consciously sought to destroy the mythic base of the genre and mirror the fractured discourse of American politics in the late sixties and early seventies.⁹ These revisionist Westerns signaled the passing of the genre, as the frontier, which was the crucial symbolic foundation of the Western, found its modern analogue in Southeast Asia. In The Hired Hand, Fonda undermined the assumptions regarding the uses of violence and the nature of heroism in the traditional Western. Ironically then, The Hired Hand simultaneously represented tendencies toward opening the Western up to new thematic concerns, especially in its vision of women, and toward the destruction of the fundamental basis of the genre.

Although Peter Fonda achieved fame as Hollywood’s most famous countercultural figure, he did not begin his career as a rebel. In such movies as Tammy and the Doctor (1963) with Debbie Reynolds, The Victors (1963), Lilith (1964) and The Young Lovers (1964), Fonda sought to establish a reputation as a leading man especially adept at romantic roles. Following this aborted attempt at attaining stardom with a clean-cut image—“they were grooming me as the next Dean Jones,” he once joked¹⁰—Fonda gained prominence in the mid-sixties through his well-publicized experimentation with marijuana and LSD and with the outlaw image he created for himself as motorcycle gang leader in The Wild Angels.¹¹ A virtually plotless, slice-of-life view of a few days in the lives of the Hell’s Angels, this movie broke new ground in its amoral approach. Made on a low budget, the movie earned a tremendous profit and, for the first time in the public mind, put Fonda astride a motorcycle.¹²

With The Trip (1967), another exploitation film directed by Corman, Fonda publicized his use of hallucinogenic drugs. The story of an advertising executive’s experimentation with LSD, The Trip featured psychedelic cinematography and a rock soundtrack. But the Corman-Fonda magic did not hold a second time, and the movie failed both commercially and critically. Despite its failure, The Trip served to bring Fonda together with co-star Dennis Hopper and screenwriter Jack Nicholson, the three principal talents who would combine to make Easy Rider. In fact, The Trip provided a kind of dry run for Easy Rider when, near the end of making the movie, Corman had to move on to other projects and left filming of some of the trip sequences in the hands of Fonda and Hopper.¹³

Having established his public persona both riding a motorcycle and using illegal drugs, Fonda’s greatest coup came when he combined these two images in Easy Rider. A deceptively simple story of two cocaine dealers who make a major sale in California and then set off on motorcycles for the Mardi Gras, meet assorted characters and, in the end, are meaninglessly murdered, Easy Rider communicated, perhaps better than any other film, the alienation, anger, and disillusionment of the counterculture. The effectiveness of the final scene largely lay in its symbolism. After Billy (Hopper) is gunned down, Wyatt (Fonda) covers the mortally wounded body with his jacket which has an American flag sewn on the back. Then, when Wyatt attempts to go for help, he, too, is shot and his motorcycle, with its gas tank painted like an American flag, bursts into flames. So much for the American dream. But in addition to being an unflinching indictment of the intolerance, greed, and violence of the dominant culture, Easy Rider also criticized the shallowness of the counterculture. When, near the film’s conclusion, Wyatt makes the classic pontification, “We blew it,” he implies that, far from attaining freedom, they, too, were caught up in the greed and mindless self-gratification of the dominant, capitalist culture.¹⁴

In some important stylistic ways, The Hired Hand picked up where Easy Rider left off. Fonda and Hopper played on the imagery of the Western in Easy Rider¹⁵; in The Hired Hand Fonda addressed the mythology of the Western more directly. Both movies are filled with religious imagery.¹⁶ The two movies also reflect Fonda’s interest in environmentalism through the use of beautiful, lingering camera pans of the Southwestern landscape.¹⁷ In other stylistic ways, The Hired Hand strongly contrasted with Easy Rider. While Easy Rider had a contemporary rock score, The Hired Hand featured a spare, acoustic soundtrack underscoring the unhurried manner in which the plot unfolds.

The transition from Easy Rider to The Hired Hand allowed Fonda to clarify the message of the former. The Hired Hand opens with a scene reminiscent of the more idealized scenes of Easy Rider, in which Wyatt and Billy, having picked up George Hanson (Nicholson), play like children as they drive down the road. In the opening scene of The Hired Hand three buddies—Arch Harris (Oates), Harry Collings (Fonda) and their young friend Dan (Robert Pratt)—who have been traveling together for some time, are playing by the side of a river. But almost immediately this idyllic scene is undercut by an image of death, as the three discover the body of a small girl floating in the river. Shortly afterward, the three enter a small town where Dan, the latest to join the group is, like George Hanson, brutally and senselessly murdered. In revenge, Harry and Arch shoot Dan’s murderer, McVey, through the feet as he sleeps.

But even at this early stage of the film, Harry has grown weary of traveling. Dan, shortly before his murder, announces he wants to go to California. Harry, however, recognizes the small town as one he and Arch have been through before, and realizes they are going in circles. Thus, he decides he is finished wandering and wants to return to the wife and daughter he abandoned seven years previously.

Many viewers of Easy Rider, and the host of imitation road movies it spawned, believed these films advocated the vaguely existential idea that freedom lay in dropping out and hitting the road. But in the opening scenes of The Hired Hand, Fonda rejects that notion. Far from seeing life on the road as liberating, Fonda portrays it as meaningless and rootless. Harry and Arch, like Wyatt and Billy, are dropouts from mainstream culture. However, while Wyatt only realizes too late that he “blew it,” there still may be time for Harry to return to a meaningful life within the most traditional of institutions, the family. Even the promise of California is not enough to convince Harry to keep traveling. Yet as Todd Gitlin wrote of the conclusion of Easy Rider:

The lasting image was of a counterculture better off contained in its California ghetto, or in the media image of its California ghetto. . . . In Easy Rider, the frontier was finally sealed after two centuries; California was the end of the blacktop. The paths of glory led but to the wrong end of a shotgun. Easy Rider was no celebration of violence, but a tantalizing warning about the consequences of transporting deviance out of the ghetto. Countercultural audiences were transfixed by the image of their demons as they watched this cautionary tale. Stay weird in L.A. was the moral.¹⁸

For those who derived this message from Easy Rider, Fonda began by saying that even California did not offer a safe haven for deviants.¹⁹

As Gitlin indicated, Easy Rider certainly did not celebrate or glorify violence. Yet it was out of harmony with one of the major trends of youth films of the late sixties—what Gitlin termed the “aestheticization” and “decontextualization” of violence. This process, as Gitlin noted, was not confined to, nor did it originate with, movies popular with alientated young audiences; it pervaded American culture. Television coverage of Vietnam—the living-room war—brought violence on a mass scale into American homes to the extent that, as Richard Lester showed in his movie Petulia (1968), Vietnam became merely a part of the background white noise against which Americans played out the social and cultural transformations of the decade. As the institutional violence of the war escalated, the New Left’s rhetoric of violence escalated in kind. Many movies of the late sixties reflected this trend. From Bonnie and Clyde to The Wild Bunch to If . . . (1968) and beyond, movies popular with the counterculture and New Left reveled in images of apocalypse. Slow-motion camera work emphasized the balletic movements of the wounded and dying while the brilliant color cinematography portrayed the beauty of red blood as it contrasted with other colors. Violence was depicted in sensual and erotic images, becoming a means of self-expression—even self-definition. This tendency in films, as Gitlin noted, featured a violence that did not even need to plead its reasons.²⁰

In The Hired Hand Fonda stems this tide of glorifying violence. Film critic Charles Champlin complained that “there are moments when The Hired Hand begins to feel like the only feature ever made entirely in slow motion.”²¹ But such a criticism missed a crucial point. Fonda did make extensive use of slow motion in the movie. The story also contained a great deal of violence. Yet, with only one exception, slow motion is not used to prolong violence.²² Instead, the violence is either implied—occurring off-screen—or it happens in real time. The final shoot-out takes a matter of seconds rather than the drawn-out, slow-motion gunfights that conclude Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. On the other hand, Fonda beautifully uses slow-motion cinematography in his sweeping, panoramic views of the landscape and his close-ups of actors’ faces, especially the fascinating faces of Warren Oates and Verna Bloom. The juxtaposition of the movie’s slow pace and the periodic spasms of violence serves to make the violence anything but aesthetic. As Fonda said, “I wanted the violence to be unacceptable and unexpected.”²³

With The Hired Hand, Fonda countered another major trend of youth movies—their sexism. As with violence, this tendency did not begin with these films, but pervaded the emerging cultures of dissent. Women participating in the civil rights and antiwar movements found themselves confined to traditional “women’s roles.” When they complained that it was this type of mold they sought to escape through the movement, their complaints were greeted with condescension, scorn, or derision. When several women anonymously circulated a “Position Paper on the role of women in SNCC” at the 1964 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee annual conference, Stokely Carmichael joked that the only position for women in SNCC was “prone.”²⁴ This attitude that women’s role in the movement was to sexually reward men—who, after all, did the real work—pervaded the New Left. “Girls say yes to boys who say No,” read a popular antiwar slogan which reinforced the idea that “girls” best served the movement flat on their backs.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s held largely different meanings for men and women. For men, “free love” meant the ability to satisfy every physical pleasure without the emotional and social obligations which traditionally had been associated with sexual relations. For women, the term implied they would service men’s quest for pleasure-fulfillment without making emotional demands on the men. Women’s sexual pleasure was incidental. Terry Southern, a popular black humorist and co-screenwriter of Easy Rider, co-authored (with Mason Hoffenberg) the underground novel Candy, in which the heroine Candy Christian, discovers “the beautiful, thrilling privilege of giving fully,” and proceeds to give herself fully to every man she meets.²⁵

Candy Christian became the prototype for what film critic Danny Peary called “the myth of the counterculture female”²⁶ and this theme was echoed throughout films popular for young audiences in the late sixties. By and large these movies featured male leads; frequently, as in Easy Rider, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), they were “male buddy stories.” Women were relegated to subordinate, often specifically sexual, roles. In M*A*S*H, Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) convinces Lieutenant “Dish” Schneider (Jo Ann Pflug) to overcome her moral qualms and sleep with a male officer in order to restore his confidence in his manhood. The role of women in Easy Rider (and the genre of road movies it inspired) was similarly one of serving men with their bodies. As Molly Haskell wrote in her study of the portrayal of women in film, From Reverence to Rape, “In the road films, the women are lucky to be mere bodies, way stations where the heroes can relieve themselves and resume their journey.”²⁷ From the sexual wanderlust of the road movies to the murderous misogyny of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, the late sixties saw women relegated to a decidedly secondary role in movies that both reflected and reinforced the sexism prevalent in the larger cultural context.

According to Haskell, the diminution of women’s roles in movies resulted from the rise of a new type of actor—the feminized male. The sixties witnessed a growing popularity of a new kind of character, the man who, Haskell said, “aesthetically or morally . . . has appropriated characteristics that once attached to movie heroines: the glamour, the sensitivity, the coyness, the narcissism, the purity, the passivity, the self-pity.”²⁸ Women had frequently complained that men were not soft, compassionate, or “feminine” enough. Ironically, in films of the sixties, men took on these characteristics and took away most of the good women’s roles. And chief among the culprits, Haskell claimed, was Peter Fonda. When she listed twenty-eight examples of this new feminized male type, Fonda’s name headed the list. These actors frequently assumed the role of sex symbol. They often were paired with less attractive actresses and given the flattering camera angles, focus and lighting to emphasize their beauty. The two movies Haskell singled out as examples of this tendency were Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, and The Hired Hand.

As Haskell stated, Fonda emphasized his own looks in The Hired Hand. While Bloom has the authentic appearance of a frontier woman, Fonda more closely resembles a beautiful flower child who somehow wandered into the Wild West. In the scene in which Harry and Hannah prepare to reconsummate their marriage, the camera lingers on Harry as he bathes, emphasizing Fonda’s androgynous sexuality. But with regard to The Hired Hand, Haskell’s criticism missed a fundamental point: Fonda, who perhaps more than anyone else symbolized the growing feminization of Hollywood’s leading men, used this trend to emphasize, by contrast, the resilience, strength and dignity—traditionally male characteristics in films—of the central female character. Hannah does not appear until the movie is a third over. In its first part, the film seems to fit standard “male buddy” and “road movie” formulae. But when Hannah enters the story, she immediately assumes a position of equal importance to Harry and Arch. The two-way friendship becomes a triangular relationship in which each character possesses an equal depth. Thus Fonda reformulated the characteristics of movies of the era to undermine their sexism.

When Harry and Arch return to Harry’s family, Hannah is less than thrilled to see them. “You don’t have any right to come back this way,” she tells Harry. “You think I can’t send you away, think you’re still married to me, but that ain’t so.” Despite her reluctance, Hannah agrees to allow Harry and Arch to stay, but only as hired hands, to work around the farm and sleep I the barn. But she insists that Janey, their daughter, not be told Harry is her father: “As far as she knows, her father is dead.”

When he and Arch go into town to buy supplies, Harry learns that rumors abound that Hannah has been having sex with her hired help. His sense of honor offended, Harry decided to confront her, despite Arch’s warning that, “If I was you, Harry, I wouldn’t be putting no questions to her. She ain’t going to take too kindly to you setting up judgment on her.” That evening Harry begins his talk with Hannah by saying that people in town had been making “remarks” about her. Although she knows what he is going to say, Hannah forces Harry to repeat the rumors, refusing to help him when he hesitates. When Harry finally manages to say, “They say you slept with all your hired hands,” Hannah stares at him, meeting his gaze evenly and unashamedly, refusing to look away. When Harry continues, saying disgustedly, “You hired men to sleep with you,” Hannah responds:

God, what do you know about it? . . . You were long gone before anybody got into my bed. And don’t think that’s ‘cause I was hankering after you. I wasn’t. That was as long as I could stand it. I walked around this room at nights going crazy for a man, any man. Didn’t matter. And sometimes when there was a man out there he knew about it and he’d come in. Sometimes I’d have him or he’d have me, whatever suits you. But not all of them. And not every time I wanted to. And when his season’s work was over, I’d pay him off no matter how well he worked or how well he pleased

me. ‘Cause the man that’s in a woman’s bed thinks he’s her boss and sooner or later they’d have tried to move their tackle out of the shed and in here and I didn’t want that. ‘Cause I’d already had one man in here and I didn’t want another.

This speech sets The Hired Hand, in its portrayal of women, light years beyond Easy Rider, in which the female characters utter such inanities as “I think he’s beautiful” and “Are you an Aquarius?”

Harry responds by riding into town the next morning and posting a bill reading: “This notice is to declare that Harry Collings believed dead has returned and taken up residence on his property. And to say that he will have no further need of hired help.” Only then does it become clear to what extent Hannah has been socially ostracized in Harry’s absence. Having read the notice, a neighbor, Mrs. Sorenson, comes to visit Hannah. It is obvious that neighbors have rarely, if ever, visited before, and that Hannah has not been welcome in town. But, as Mrs. Sorenson says on departing, “We’ll be looking for you in town. Folks’ll be looking out now that your man’s come home.”

However, Hannah is not a late-twentieth century feminist transplanted into the old West. She is, rather, a product of the cultural and personal experiences drawn from living on the outskirts of a small, frontier town in the late nineteenth century. She did not want to be a self-sufficient, independent woman, but circumstances forced her to become one, successfully managing the farm for seven years without support from either her husband or the townspeople. Still, she yearns for a stable relationship with a husband. When Harry rides into town to post his notice, Hannah thinks he is leaving her and she breaks down weeping. When she and Harry discuss the possibility of re-establishing conjugal relations, she admits, “I’m scared to think it might come right again after all this time. I don’t believe. But I want it to be.”

Hannah’s determination, in Harry’s absence, to continue to satisfy her sexual needs and do so on her own terms, has its psychic costs. Hannah knows she is violating cultural mores by her actions and feels the need to degrade herself in doing so. As she tells Arch, her trysts occurred “out in the field or in the hay. Sometimes just down in the dirt. That’s right. You can tell, can’t you?” Despite the social and psychic costs of her life without Harry and her desire to have him back, Hannah continues to assert her independence. She tells Arch that it “wouldn’t really matter if it was you or Harry who came to my bed tonight.” And even after she and Harry re-establish their marital relationship, she refuses to tell Janey that he is her father.²⁹

After Harry moves back in with Hannah, Arch—not wanting to interfere with the reunited family—decides to leave for California, where he had originally intended to go with Dan. But Arch is kidnapped by McVey, who wants revenge against Arch and Harry for shooting him through the feet. McVey sends one of Arch’s fingers to Harry as a warning. Realizing he is responsible for Arch’s predicament, Harry is forced to choose whether to stay with Hannah and Janey or to try to save his friend. He feels he must go, despite Hannah’s protestations. Though he successfully rescues Arch, Harry is killed in the process. The movie ends with Arch returning to Hannah’s farm, with the implication that he will fill Harry’s role.

More than any other character, Arch represents the inchoate, existential motivations for life on the road. Unlike Dan and Harry, practically nothing is revealed about Arch’s background. When, in the beginning, Harry asks him if he plans to go to the coast with Dan, Arch replies, “Good as anywhere, better than most.” When Hannah questions him as to why he came to her farm with Harry, he says, “Well ma’am, if I wasn’t doing this, I’d be doing something else.” The conclusion, in which Arch, who has no roots, gives up wandering to return to the closest approximation to a family he has ever known, represents Fonda’s final renunciation of the idea that with Easy Rider he had advocated dropping out and hitting the road.

The significance of The Hired Hand lies in the way Fonda utilizes the trappings of films aimed at young, alienated audiences to subvert many of the tendencies of those movies. Opening like a traditional male-buddy, road movie, The Hired Hand ultimately rejects the idea of dropping out of mainstream society. Through his use of slow motion and the violent nature of the story, Fonda reverses the message of the contemporary portrayal of violence. In The Hired Hand violence, and violent death, is anything but erotic or aesthetic. If the dominant trend portrayed, in Gitlin’s words, “violence as act of will rather than consequence,”³⁰ Fonda shows it is a choice fraught with unforeseen consequences. Finally, Fonda exploits his own image as a new type of leading man, the feminized male, to portray in high relief a strong and independent female character. And he does so in a Western, one of the most male-oriented of film genres.

Fonda admitted he did not set out to make a feminist film. As he has pointed out, “I didn’t know that much about women. But I knew that I didn’t know that much about women.” However, he realized the movie’s focal point needed to be the triangular relationship among Harry, Arch, and Hannah. To give it a solid center, then, all three had to be strong characters of equal depth and interest.³¹ This basic idea, combined with Bloom’s subtle performance, set in contrast to the dominant portrayal of women in movies at the time, make The Hired Hand one of the few films of the period that can be regarded as feminist.³² Coming from Hollywood’s most recognizable countercultural figure, The Hired Hand represents a conscious criticism of gender stereotypes and power relationships existing in both the dominant culture and the emerging cultures of dissent.

The Hired Hand stands practically alone as a feminist Western because, while Fonda was opening the genre up to the possibility of more positive roles for women, he was also part of a broader trend that was killing the genre. The Western had always worked best on a mythic scale, in terms of black hats and white hats, good and evil. The sixties, however witnessed a wave of revisionism in the Western. Anti-Westerns like Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch blurred the distinctions between good and evil. Movies like Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) reversed the traditional Hollywood Western image of good whites and bad Indians in the name of greater historical accuracy.

The explosion of this new type of Western in the sixties and early seventies represented the dying throes of the genre. Once the myth of the West was destroyed, audiences soon lost interest and, by the mid-seventies, the Western was, for all practical purposes, moribund (at least until it minor renaissance in the early nineties). The Hired Hand fit in with this tide of Western revisionism. Harry and Arch, in anti-Western fashion, are morally ambiguous characters. They brutally shoot the sleeping McVey and Harry shoots another man in cold blood. Thus The Hired Hand was enlarging the possibilities of the Western while simultaneously rejecting the mythic basis on which the genre achieved its widespread popularity. Fonda blazed a path few had the opportunity to follow.³³

1 Gerald Cole and Wess Farrell, The Fondas (New York: St Martins Press, 1984), 128.

2 Elena Rodriguez, Dennis Hopper: A Madness to his Method (New York: St Martins Press, 1988), 65.

3  Toby Thompson, “The Disappearance of Peter Fonda,” Esquire, March 1984, 218.

4 The film had an extremely favorable review in The New York Times. See Roger Greenspun, “Peter Fonda Directs and is Cast as Hero,” The New York Times, August 12, 1971, 29. But according to Filmfacts, a journal that rated the critical record of movies, the overall response to The Hired Hand was five favorable, ten negative, and one mixed reviews. Filmfacts, 1971, 369-371.

5 “Playboy Interview: Peter Fonda,” Playboy, September 1970, 90, 92. Danny Peary, Cult Movies 3 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 78.

6 These road movies, which were strongly influenced by Easy Rider, include such films as Five Easy Pieces (1970), Zabriskie Point (1970), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), Vanishing Point (1971), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Scarecrow (1973), and Your Three Minutes Are Up (1973).

7 Thompson, 218. Fonda’s claim is problematic, as there were a few other Westerns which could arguably be claimed as “feminist” made before 1971 (such as Nicholas Ray’s 1954 film Johnny Guitar). But The Hired Hand is the first feminist Western to come out of the women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies.

8 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 323. The decade was from 1962/1963 to 1973.

9 On the development of the Western in the late sixties and early seventies, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), especially 578-623.

10 Thompson, 218.

11 Rex Reed, Do You Sleep in the Nude? (New York: New American Library, 1968), 221-223; “Playboy Interview,” 102-106.

12 Reed, 229; Cole and Farrell, 97-99.

13 Cole and Farrell, 124-128.

14 “Playboy Interview,” 90, 92.

15 For a discussion of Western imagery in Easy Rider, see Peary, Cult Movies 3, 80-81.

16 For example, in Easy Rider, Wyatt and Billy’s Mexican drug connection is named Jesus, while the New Orleans prostitute played by Toni Basil is named Mary; both the toothless farmer with a large family and the members of the commune pray before their meals; the background music chants Kyrie eleison, Christe, while Wyatt and Billy eat and discuss whether they should go to the whorehouse; and the jail, the whorehouse and the cemetery “trip” scene are filled with religious images. In The Hired Hand, Harry and Arch say a long prayer at Dan’s funeral; they shoot the villain, McVey, through the feet and the camera focuses on the wounds in an ironic stigmata image; and in the end, Harry is shot and lies dead, stretched out like Christ on the cross, with two criminals lying dead, one on each side of him.

17 The Hired Hand was filmed on location in New Mexico. For a discussion of Fonda’s interest in environmentalism, see “Playboy Interview,” 94, 96.

18 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Un-making of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 202.

19 Telephone interview with Peter Fonda, August 24, 1989. Fonda said he did not intend to single out California in this manner. But the fact that California is specifically mentioned by Dan or Arch on four separate occasions and that it is the only state mentioned by name in the film certainly must have conveyed to some the message that Fonda was contradicting the idea that California held some special position for the counterculture.

20 Gitlin, 197-202. Quotation found on 197.

21 Charles Champlin, “‘Hired’ Echoes ‘Rider’ Theme,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1971, Section 4, 1.

22 The single exception—when Harry and Arch shoot McVey through the feet in revenge for the murder of Dan—utilized slow motion to emphasize the religious imagery of the wounds in the feet.

23 Telephone interview with Peter Fonda, August 24, 1989.

24 For a general discussion of sexism in the civil rights movement and New Left, see Sarah Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980).

25 Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1983, originally published 1957), 24.

26 Danny Peary, Cult Movies 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 159. For more on the sexism of films of the sixties and especially of those geared toward countercultural audiences, see Haskell, passim, and Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 248-292.

27 Haskell, 336.

28 Ibid, 359.

29 For instance, when Janey runs to tell Harry that a messenger has come with news of Arch, she calls him “Harry” rather than “dad.”

30 Gitlin, 199.

31 Telephone interview with Peter Fonda, August 24, 1989.

32 The term “feminist” is problematic, having different meanings depending on speaker and social/historical context. For present purposes, I agree with Jeanne Allen, who has written, “While there is perhaps no doctrine essential to feminism but rather a meta-communicative style of negotiating strategies to deal with particular historical conditions, I would argue that reciprocity—an insistence upon egalitarian distribution of power informed by empathic understanding in social and sexual relationships—is a fundamental goal of this social philosophy and political movement.” Allen, “Looking Through Rear Window: Hitchcock’s Traps and Lures of Hetersexual Romance,” in E. Deidre Pribram, ed., Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television (New York: Verso, 1988), 33.

33 It remains to be seen whether the renaissance of the Western in the past few years will provide more positive roles for women. So far, the results have not been too encouraging.