← Back to Reviews
in
The Hired Hand (1971) N
American western that tries its best to look and feel European.
A man returns to his wife and daughter after years of drifting and searching his happiness from the world. He's made friends and enemies during that time and past will eventually return to haunt him.
The premise feels like a standard western but the presentation is very much like European film (at times it even reminds me of Finnish movies except it's technically more solid). People talk little, they don't look each other while talking, there's long passages without any dialogue and the nature is often more important than the characters. People are also dirty and unkempt unlike in typical westerns of the time.
Visually the film is beautiful but I didn't like how they put two images on top of each other in many situations, it just messed up otherwise great shots. With very minimal story the camera was never in a hurry and the music accompanied the placid flow of images really well. It was always balancing right between boring and relaxed (it was always borderline both).
Acting was great. There was good chemistry between all the protagonists and bad guys were easy to hate. Film didn't tell us much about the characters but despite of that they felt very human.
It took me couple of hours to decide if I liked this enough to say it was good but eventually the reply to that was yes, very barely yes.
American western that tries its best to look and feel European.
A man returns to his wife and daughter after years of drifting and searching his happiness from the world. He's made friends and enemies during that time and past will eventually return to haunt him.
The premise feels like a standard western but the presentation is very much like European film (at times it even reminds me of Finnish movies except it's technically more solid). People talk little, they don't look each other while talking, there's long passages without any dialogue and the nature is often more important than the characters. People are also dirty and unkempt unlike in typical westerns of the time.
Visually the film is beautiful but I didn't like how they put two images on top of each other in many situations, it just messed up otherwise great shots. With very minimal story the camera was never in a hurry and the music accompanied the placid flow of images really well. It was always balancing right between boring and relaxed (it was always borderline both).
Acting was great. There was good chemistry between all the protagonists and bad guys were easy to hate. Film didn't tell us much about the characters but despite of that they felt very human.
It took me couple of hours to decide if I liked this enough to say it was good but eventually the reply to that was yes, very barely yes.