Welcome to Hard Times

Plot synopsis:
A vicious stranger, the "Man from Bodie" (Aldo Ray), terrorizes the small settlement of Hard Times. (In Doctorow's book, the town is in the Dakota territory. In the movie, it is assumed to be in western Nevada.) He kills the only men who stand up to him, town founder Mr. Fee (Paul Birch) and town undertaker Mr. Hanson (Elisha Cook, Jr.), as well as raping and killing Fee's girlfriend Flo (Ann McCrea). Before he leaves, he burns down the handful of buildings.
Only a few people stay, among them Will Blue (Henry Fonda). Blue takes in Fee's young orphaned son Jimmy (Michael Shea) and convinces his woman Molly (Janice Rule) to stay there with them. A few other people arrive. Zar (Keenan Wynn) and his four saloon girls settle in to serve the nearby miners. Isaac Maple (John Anderson) comes looking for his long-gone storekeeper brother, so Blue persuades him to reopen the general store. A drifter, Leo Jenks (Warren Oates), also lazes around town.
Blue tries hard to build a family and a prosperous community, but Molly despises him for not standing up against the Man from Bodie and is obsessed with revenge against him for what he did. They both expect the Man will return in the spring. Molly works on Jenks, a fine shot, and even infects Jimmy with her consuming hatred, getting him a shotgun.
Finally, the villain shows up and resumes his terrorizing ways. Molly persuades Jenks to go after him. Jenks ends up killing Zar by mistake and is gunned down. Blue is wounded in the shoulder, but then the Man runs out of bullets and Blue shoots him several times.
Blue carries the body home to show Molly. When she gingerly approaches, the dying Man revives and grabs her hand. Her panicked yell for help brings Jimmy running with his shotgun. Blue tries to grab the weapon, but it goes off, hitting the Man in the face killing him, but also hitting Molly in the stomach. Just before she dies, she asks Blue to hold her. Later, from her gravesite, Blue and Jimmy see a growing town.

Tags: revenge, murder, sadist

Review:
this is one of the lousiest movies i've ever seen.The only reason i kept watching this is because i was trying to understand why H.Fonda was in this movie.It seems to be trying to promote pacifism but its so stupidly done that it actually manages the complete opposite,the viewer is convinced by the end of this movie that guns and violence are absolutely necessary.Fonda's character doesn't make any sense other than he is a total spineless coward.There is absolutely no rational excuse for his actions.The whole story is supposed to convince the viewer that Fonda's character is right,but there is very little argument in favor of a man who just sits around doing nothing to stop evil because he is afraid.
There are a lot of interesting aspects to this above average adult western -- Fonda plays a wimp, Keenan Wynn plays a pimp who operates out of a bible tent, and Ray plays a "badman" who seems to have no motive for his destruction of the town of "Hard Times" (they could've picked a better name, eh?) than pure sadism.
In Fonda's quest to prove his manhood and make a stand in Hard Times, a lot of fairly complex human themes come to the fore.
Rule plays a believably highstrung Western Woman, bent on teaching her adopted son how to kill because she doesn't think Fonda has the guts.One of Kennedy's better later westerns before he switched completely to the comedic mode, notable for a solid script based on an interesting story with great character performances throughout..
Henry Fonda must have felt like Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley, he and the film got great critical reviews and the public stayed away in droves.No accident, western fans expect certain things in their films and Welcome to Hard Times delivers none of them.
It is a realistic depiction of the growth of a western town, maybe too realistic.Henry Fonda is the mayor of this little burg and purportedly the hero of the piece.
The main story line is the conflict between Rule and Fonda, especially over young Michael Shea whose father was killed by Aldo Ray and who Fonda has now taken over raising.Some veteran players like Keenan Wynn, Warren Oates, Denver Pyle, Edgar Buchanan, and Lon Chaney, Jr., make things interesting as the story drags on.
We are supposed to believe that one man rides into a town and kills people and burns it to the ground while everybody just sits around and watches.
(Thanks to the IMDb 'My Movies' I can set them up and get alerted to them coming on, a very nice feature.) This has to be the all-time worst Western I have ever seen.The townspeople in this movie are the direct ancestors of the families in the home security system ads, where they put a night stand up against the bedroom door and are talking to the security guy on the phone.
Just cower and hope he won't make it hurt too much for too long.As another reviewer said, in the old West, any idiot who tried to do what 'the bad man' did in this movie would find himself dead in side of five minutes, because back then, people stood up for and defended their family and property and town.
The 'bad man' would have been the 'dead man' in no time, and a person as wimpy as the mayor played here by Fonda would have been disgraced and yanked out of office pronto.This whole movie is written from the viewpoint that bad people will eventually stop being bad if we let them tire themselves out beating us up, so we should not do anything about them.
It is a complete frantic fantasy from the viewpoint of a clueless, modern-day political liberal, plain and simple.I can almost forgive Henry Fonda for appearing in this cow plop of a movie because his role in 'Once Upon A Time In The West' was so powerful.
They died as ineffectual cowards, and their only legacy was the shame of being too afraid to stand up for themselves against the power of bad.The 'bad man', riding through town, doing crazy things and cackling and laughing the whole time, is one of the most bizarre and totally unrealistic characters I have ever seen in a movie, let alone one around whom the story is supposed to revolve.
The bad man who comes down from the hills and destroys the town is analagous to Moby Dick, more about dark fate than satanic evil.
Aldo Ray is scary and Henry Fonda is a great weak guy.
This movie was produced in the 60s and bears the stamp of those times, times when the inmates tried to run the asylum--and very nearly succeeded.So watch and enjoy the fine acting in this film, but don't succumb to it's defeatist message..
Residents of a lawless three-horse town in the Old West are paralyzed with fear after psychopathic stranger Aldo Ray arrives, shooting people and setting fires.
Time passes, and lawyer-turned-mayor Henry Fonda helps rebuild what's left of the community, but when Ray returns, Fonda has to confront his own fear and mortality.
Lots of familiar western-movie faces in the cast, but the characters are clichés and cut-outs, and the melodramatic plotting is only useful for unintended laughs.
It would be very important to have a dialogue between Fonda and Janice at that time, then the statement of the film would come through.
From dottering old  Norman Thayer in "On Golden Pond" to the child-murdering gunman in "Once Upon a Time in the West" and everything in between, Henry Fonda showed us his multi-faceted talent over and over again, as he does here as a waffling, semi-cowardly man initially unwilling to confront a bully that terrorizes a small community in the old west.Aldo Ray's is ideally suited for his character as well, as the murderous brute intent upon destroying a small town and anyone who tries to stop him.As usual, mild-mannered Good eventually triumphs over seemingly unstoppable Evil, but then, by 1967 Clint Eastwood already had a lock on the other outcome.
A sociopathic stranger (vicious as well as marvelously wicked Aldo Ray) takes advantage of the frightened townspeople and burns down the saloon , destroys the small hardscrabble village but the 'mayor' Will Blue (Henry Fonda , his role mentions he is 49 years old at one point and turning 50 at another and yet Fonda was well over 60 at the time of the filming) doesn't stand up to crazed murderous .
The traditional story and exciting script was well screen-written by Burt Kennedy though clichés run through-out , the agreeable tale is enhanced for interesting moments developed among main characters and especially on the relationship between Henry Fonda and Janice Rule .
Here are reunited a top-notch plethora of secondary actors , most of them playing the frightened townspeople as Keenan Wynn , Janis Paige , John Anderson , Warren Oates , Fay Spain , Edgar Buchanan , Paul Fix , Denver Pyle , Lon Chaney Jr. and Royal Dano who is exactly right as Indian medicine man .
This violent Western ¨Welcome to Hard Times¨ is a Henry Fonda vehicle , if you like his particular performance ,you'll enjoy this one ..
Elisha Cook is given the opportunity to reprise his Shane role, the spunky, fearless, impulsive, and doomed fool: Jack Palance, with one of cinema's great sneers, shot him dead in Shane and Aldo Ray does him the same courtesy in Welcome to Hard Times.
Absolutely nothing interesting happens in this odd western.OK so the story is as follows; A very bad man comes to town, he rapes a whore, kills a couple of people and sets the town on fire.
The rest of the movie focuses on the rebuilding of the town leaded by Blue (Henry Fonda), some whores and a couple of other completely uninteresting people.
At the end the very bad man returns of course again (surprise, surprise!).The characters are absolutely the dullest and weirdest I have seen in a long time.
UK: '"Welcome to Hard Times" inadvertently delivers so much in the way of good times that it seems uncharitable to criticise.' Ji: "It seems to be trying to promote pacifism but its so stupidly done that it actually manages the complete opposite,the viewer is convinced by the end of this movie that guns and violence are absolutely necessary." I was 22 when I saw it and unprepared to appreciate unintended comedy at the time so I found it one of the most frustratingly boring experiences of my life--it actually contended with our high school's football games for top honors.
TV writer and director Burt Kennedy brought together a great collection of western actors (e.g., Henry Fonda, Warren Oates, Royal Dano, Paul Fix, Denver Pyle, Edgar Buchanan, Lon Chaney Jr.) and then wasted their talents on this heavy handed and predictable script.
The evil man (Aldo Ray) that comes into town can mean a lot of things.
Mayor Will Blue, played by Henry Fonda, on the other hand is our good side, which has to find courage to fight the evil side.
It is always difficult to fight evil, whether it comes from our own personality or somewhere else.This town, named Hard Times, is hardly an easy place to life.
This is a great Henry Fonda film from 1967 where Fonda plays the role as Mayor Will Blue who is a peace abiding man and hates to use his fists or a weapon against anyone.
This is a great Henry Fonda film which he made when he reached the age of 60 years and was beginning to find very few roles on the Silver Screen and then decided to perform on the Broadway Stage in New York City.
A brutal western morality tale starring Henry Fonda as the "mayor" of a tiny frontier town whose courage is tested when deranged outlaw Aldo Ray runs rampant burning buildings, raping saloon girl Janice Rule and killing anyone who stands up to him.
Henry Fonda's role tries to show that the peaceful method is preferable to wild gunsling executions (in contrast to the Clint Eastwood films) but realizes that he will be called on to draw the line and finally stand up to be counted as a man, however modest that maybe.
Aldo Rey is frighteningly ferocious as the homicidal maniac that terrorizes the town of Hard Times.He really steals the film.
When the film begins, a crazed gunman (Aldo Ray) comes into a crappy western town and terrorizes everyone.
He brutalizes the women, burns down many of the buildings and kills a bunch of men--all the while, the town's mayor, Blue (Henry Fonda) does nothing.
Eventually, the man leaves and Blue tries to put what's left of the town (and there ain't much) back in one piece.After a VERY long time and LOTS of meandering, the crazed gunman returns.
The Problem is that Unlike the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and the Western's of Sam Peckinpah this one from Director Burt Kennedy and Star Henry Fonda was a Monumental Flop because it is just Bad Entertainment.It's not the Pacifistic Message that is at Fault here, it is the Unrealistic, Frustrating, Flat-Line of the Movie's Unappealing Nature that made this Dead On Arrival both with Critics and at the Box Office.
it is really a good movie because it shows the stupidity and pointlessness of violence.hero is not a typical western saviour who can do everything to please our sense of believing big lies without questions but a real human being who fights with difficulty while going through almost every emotion we come across in our daily lives.his very inglorious, unheroic attempts at killing a better gun fighter are our glorious efforts to find a way of happiness in misery.his persistence to stay is like our struggle to live in this dangerous world.the terrible winter in which the people in this movie experience resembles our lives full of fear, hopes, revenge, love, hatred and above all struggle for a peaceful live.the stranger who destroys everything is an embodiment of our negative destructive psychological attitudes to civilization, our sadism and our expertise at destroying things.
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.
Wonderfully daft piece of movie-making that actually grows worse with age, "Welcome to Hard Times" is a presumably honest description of the feeling author E L Doctorow experienced when viewing the Burt Kennedy screen version of his work.By turns jaunty, tedious, unfathomable and unwatchable, it actually suffers from a greater absence of structure than the town it purports to chronicle, a place which keeps being, er, burned down by a laughing madman who no-one can stop because he's A Symbol.Most of the time, of course, this doesn't matter, because Kennedy thinks he's directing a musical, a sort of Seven Whores for Seven Miners, as a result of which one scene after another has dancing girls a-dancing and drinking men a-drinking, all of this to the accompaniment of a music score that if not played by someone tone-deaf was certainly written by one.Script felicities are many and varied, though none is more rewarding than the scene where Fonda is told that the mine -- upon whose fortunes the town depends -- has just closed, after which he immediately begs his adopted son to settle down in this selfsame place of doom and earn himself an education instead of playing around with guns.Logic, right.When it's not being burned down, the town -- a tent and two wood-frame buildings whose Nouvelle Vague minimalism is echoed by a cemetery with just one grave -- is regularly assailed by Janice Rule's hilarious Irish accent, though she certainly gets her just desserts (as indeed, do nearly all the cast, shot down either accidentally or deliberately in a climax so stupefyingly barmy that you wonder if Russ Meyer assumed the direction after Kennedy took an errant slug.)With a budget to die for -- well, no self-respecting production designer could contemplate living on the money allocated here -- "Welcome to Hard Times" inadvertently delivers so much in the way of good times that it seems uncharitable to criticise.But then, my name isn't Doctorow..
A strange man from Bodie (Aldo Ray) rides into a jerkwater town that he proceeds to terrorize.
All the while the semi-cowardly pacifist lawyer-sheriff (Will Blue = Henry Fonda) sits, then watches, and then works up the courage to get the drop on the sadist or perhaps shoot him in the back.
He certainly does a good job in killing off much of the veteran cast in his two town "visits." A movie feature is the double ending, perhaps one of the first for a US Western, and perhaps a prelude to future slasher flicks.There is no way this movie was the real West, which was tamed after all.
Then the cowardice continues in full bloom.(BIG spoiler) Fonda, the film's alleged hero, persists with his interference to protect the murderer-rapist-bad-smeller, and manages to get his best friend and a town businessman, both needlessly killed.
It seems that Kennedy's sole purpose of making this film was to annoy and irritate viewers - and to see how many western movie clichés he can cram into 100 minutes.The film opens with twenty minutes of pure imbecility: the "bad man"/drunkard kills, rapes, loots, and then burns the "town" down, and about a dozen inhabitants of this town don't do a thing to stop him.
After the "bad man" leaves, the cowardly, philosophizing Fonda starts rebuilding the town; what follows from here onwards is over an hour of pure tedium, with Fonda moralizing endlessly and giving preachy, corny PACIFISTIC speeches every time he can get someone to listen.At the end of the movie the "bad man" comes back, very predictably, and he starts doing the EXACT SAME thing he did a year earlier - this being one of Kennedy's numerous attempts to inject symbolism into this dreary mess of a movie.
(Look up my review of another cinematic piece of crap, "Gandhi".) This film was made at the height of popularity of Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, so my guess is that it was a major flop, since most people can't identify with the sort of arrogant quasi-hippy gobbledygook that movies like this espouse.
And labeling the town "Hard Times" is worse than pretentious; it's downright pathetic.I guess it'll be quite a while until I come across a movie as bad as this rubbish.
Fonda plays a cowardly mayor who lets a outlaw rape, kill and burn down his town.
SMALL SPOILERS Hard Times is the name of a town...well, it's more like only just a street, where the people have no joy, no past and certainly no future.
There are about 20 people living there and about 65 % of that population dies when a big, angry man ( Aldo Ray ) comes to town to raise a little hell.
Still, there's fear in the air because the man who already destroyed the town once is most likely to come back...Welcome to Hard Times isn't that much of a good film.
Henry Fonda ( if he wouldn't star in it, I'd probably never seen it ) is great as the pathetic, cowardly mayor.
Aldo Ray is very impressive as the tough-looking brute man who comes to destroy the town twice.
"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 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.