"Welcome to Hard Times" (Burt Kennedy, 1967) is a visibly cheap, shabby little Western starring Henry Fonda in his senior stage as a movie star. The film reflects the anarchic dissonance and harsh violence of the newfangled "spaghetti" Westerns then pouring out of Europe, but ultimately its sensibility and construction belong to television. It's a traditional Western (partly comedic and partly melodramatic) that plays like a bunch of TV Western episodes pasted together in slack fashion, while also projecting some of that "spaghetti" dirtiness and desolation. The 61-year old Fonda (playing a 49-year old but looking his real age) is excellent as a wary, avuncular, impotent realist who shies away from violence and heroic action until he has no other choice. Janice Rule, as Fonda's testily neurotic and misguided female antagonist, is also stellar, as is Aldo Ray as the wildly destructive stranger, an anarchic monster periodically haunting this muddy little outpost (which can hardly be considered a town). Unfortunately, these actors are diamonds in dung in a tonally inconsistent, unfocused, and clumsy little Western from Kennedy. The spastic, sudden violence of the opening and closing acts, and the conflict between Fonda and Rule over the fate of the young boy (played by 13-year old Michael Shea), make "Welcome to Hard Times" worthy of a look. However, the picture isn't pretty.
Review of Welcome to Hard Times
