Well, Burt Kennedy is responsible for some screenplays that sometimes sound like folk poetry, but this movie, written and directed by Kennedy, just seems to go on and on, from one outrage to the next, without discernible point.
Aldo Ray is the big hulking flab that terrorizes the tiny wooden town of Hard Times for no reason other than that it seems to give him pleasure to pillage the place, rape the women, and kill any men who object and any females who happen to get in the way of a bullet. Fonda is the hapless mayor who is about as good with a gun as James Stewart was in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," which is to say no good at all. He constantly hesitates, preaches pacifism.
Ray rides into town, wrecks everything, burns the buildings, and leaves. He comes back later to do it again. Good triumphs but if Fonda is Hamlet, this time the hero survives, while everyone else is toast.
I couldn't get with it. The photography is dark and dreary. The dialog is sparse and pedestrian. So is the direction. Others have evidently gotten more out of it than I did. I found it depressing.
Aldo Ray is the big hulking flab that terrorizes the tiny wooden town of Hard Times for no reason other than that it seems to give him pleasure to pillage the place, rape the women, and kill any men who object and any females who happen to get in the way of a bullet. Fonda is the hapless mayor who is about as good with a gun as James Stewart was in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," which is to say no good at all. He constantly hesitates, preaches pacifism.
Ray rides into town, wrecks everything, burns the buildings, and leaves. He comes back later to do it again. Good triumphs but if Fonda is Hamlet, this time the hero survives, while everyone else is toast.
I couldn't get with it. The photography is dark and dreary. The dialog is sparse and pedestrian. So is the direction. Others have evidently gotten more out of it than I did. I found it depressing.