The Hired Hand (1971)

          Easygoing actor Peter Fonda’s directorial career never amounted to much (he’s only made three movies thus far, each of less interest than the preceding), so it’s surprising just how good his first film was. Made at a time when Fonda was synonymous with the counterculture movement, The Hired Hand is a throwback instead of a contemporary tale, but it’s infused with themes that resonate with the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” era. The Hired Hand is also a glorious exercise in ’70s-cinema style, featuring luminous photography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond and an evocative acoustic score by Bruce Langhorne. So, even if the story is a bit thin, the piece is engrossing on other levels.

          Fonda stars as Harry Collings, a world-weary cowboy roaming the West with his amiable pal, Arch Harris (Warren Oates), and a younger man who recently joined their travels, Dan (Robert Pratt). Rolling into a tiny town one day, the three have drinks while Harry explains that he’s decided to quit his cowboy lifestyle and return to the homestead he abandoned 11 years ago. (Harry walked away from his wife and young child because he felt trapped by domesticity.) Before Harry can make his break, he and his companions get into a battle with McVey (Severn Darden), the brutal thug who lords over the small town.

          Dan dies and McVey is badly injured, but Harry and Arch figure the matter is settled, so they head off to Harry’s old farm. The duo discovers that bitter experience has transformed Hannah Collings (Verna Bloom) from a wide-eyed newlywed to a tough frontier woman—she’s understandably ambivalent about her husband’s return. What ensues is a simple but touching story about emotional connections, the obligations of friendship, and the repercussions of violence.

          Even with genuine-sounding dialogue by screenwriter Alan Sharp, who wrote a handful of offbeat ’70s Westerns, The Hired Hand is more effective as a tone poem than as a narrative. Zsigmond’s photography is wonderfully naturalistic, full of blazing colors and moody silhouettes, so the movie looks like an expertly shot travelogue. Editor Frank Mazzola, who receives an unusual credit for “film editing and montages,” works wonders with Zsigmond’s footage, solarizing and/or tweaking speeds to create lyrical passages set to Langhorne’s downbeat melodies—these montages are gorgeous meditations on sensation and texture.

          Perhaps Fonda’s most interesting directorial choice is steering the cast, himself included, toward restraint. Bloom, Fonda, and Oates speak so infrequently, and with such economy, that silences says as much as their words. Similarly, these characters guard their emotions so closely that we find ourselves peering into their eyes for glimpses of inner life. The Hired Hand falls short of greatness because of its lack of ambition and its overreliance on familiar themes, but as a mood piece, it’s superlative.

The Hired Hand: GROOVY

Demon Seed (1977)

Taking the crazed-computer menace of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in a depraved new direction, this strange thriller is based on a Dean Koontz novel, but bears the unmistakable signature of its director, Donald Cammell, notorious for co-directing the perverse cult classic Performance (1970). Even within the confines of a big-budget Hollywood movie, Cammell lets his freak flag fly throughout Demon Seed, which features an anguished Julie Christie as a woman who gets imprisoned, tortured, and impregnated (!) by a sentient computer. The source of her misery is her scientist husband (Fritz Weaver), who creates a supercomputer called Proteus IV; the computer’s desire for physical life prompts Christie’s artificial-intelligence insemination. Much of the movie comprises two-character scenes with Christie and Proteus, which mostly manifests as lava-lamp patterns on computer screens, so Christie’s main costar is unseen actor Robert Vaughn, who provides Proteus’ voice without much vigor. Adding a hallucinatory feel are long electronic-animation montages by Frank Mazzola, and Proteus’ eventual physical manifestation as a weird cube/diamond thing that extends long tendrils of geometric shapes. These trippy sequences are like Yes album covers come to life. However the movie suffers from idiotic plotting and long dull stretches, plus the miscasting of two behind-the-scenes players: Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler and frequent Peckinpah composer Jerry Fielding both contribute great work that belongs in a different, less bizarre movie. As for Christie, she flails through scenes that would be impossible for anyone to play, and seems embarrassed by her surroundings. So although Demon Seed is pretty damn weird, grounding elements like Butler’s crisp cinematography, Christie’s emphatically expressed anguish, and Vaughn’s overly explanatory voiceovers tether the movie to earth when it clearly wants to drift into even weirder territory.

Demon Seed: FREAKY

Suzanne (1973)

          The popular arts of the late ’60s and early ’70s were filled with hippy-dippy freakouts made by plugged-in youths who perceived themselves as explorers charting the outer edges of human consciousness, often aided by mind-altering party favors. And that’s about the only way to contextualize the impenetrable drama Suzanne. Jared Martin plays an insufferably self-important movie director whose newest project has something to do with Christ mythology, and he finds inspiration when he meets a moon-eyed blonde named Suzanne (Sondra Locke). Inexplicably drawn to her pompous new suitor, Suzanne dumps artist Leo (Paul Sand), a fragile soul who’s clearly one angst-ridden episode away from a nervous breakdown. The main thread of the movie concerns the director’s preparations to impale Suzanne with real nails so his crucifixion scene has the desired impact, but the movie also follows Leo’s descent into madness, and the hapless efforts of an Establishment newspaper columnist (Gene Barry) to investigate what sorta vibes the counterculture kids are groovin’ to these days.
          If any of these particulars make Suzanne sound interesting, be warned that the “story” is presented in weird, disassociated vignettes punctuated by arty montages of things like people in clown makeup dancing around in trippy fisheye-lens shots. By the time this movie was released in 1973, more interesting filmmakers had been doing this sort of thing for several years, so Suzanne was already a relic with its narrative opacity and obnoxiously collegiate dialogue. (Sample Suzanne chatter: “You are beauty. I need to stay away from you. It’s not anything you did, it’s just I don’t know what I do with what you are.”) The movie gets points for seeing its pretentious premise all the way through to the gruesome conclusion, and Suzanne also provides a load of interesting Hollywood footnotes: It was inspired by the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne,” which appears several times on the soundtrack; Shaft creator Ernest Tidyman was a script consultant (even though the script ain’t too tidy, man); Performance editor Frank Mazzola assembled the montages; and the cast includes Richard Dreyfuss and future Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris.
          In case you’re wondering how a movie this strange gets made, Suzanne writer-director Michael Barry’s dad is actor Gene Barry, who played TV’s Bat Masterson in the ’50s; Papa Berry executive-produced (read: financed) the flick in addition to costarring.

Suzanne: LAME