The Hired Hand - Response

Response

The Hired Hand received generally mixed reviews, with some critics flippantly dismissing the film as a “hippie-western”. Variety felt the film had "a disjointed story, a largely unsympathetic hero, and an obtrusive amount of cinematic gimmickry which renders inarticulate the confused story subtleties." Time described it as "pointless, virtually plotless, all but motionless and a lode of pap." But Roger Greenspun of The New York Times praised the movie as, “ rather ambitious simple movie, with a fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning rising to the mystical, which seems so much a part of the very contemporary old West.” Jay Cocks wrote that the film was "a fine, elegiac western".

Despite Universal’s hopes for another Easy Rider-sized youth hit, The Hired Hand was an enormous flop. It was sold to NBC-TV for subsequent television showings in 1973, where the majority of the film’s fans first saw the movie. After that, it became difficult to see, rarely repeated on television and playing only occasional film festivals over the years.

In 2001, the film was fully restored and exhibited at a number of festivals to a generally enthusiastic critical response. Subsequently, the Sundance Channel released a DVD of the film in two separate editions that same year. The film is now well regarded as a minor western classic, with a 91% favorability rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Bill Kauffman has called it "a lovely meditation on friendship and responsibility, one of the least-known great movies of that richest of all cinematic eras, the early 1970s." However, some critics find the film overrated. Glenn Erickson (aka “DVD Savant”) believed the movie was “light in the story department and directed at a mannered crawl…”