Welcome to Hard Times (film)
Welcome to Hard Times is a 1967 American Western film directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Henry Fonda as the leader of a dying town who is too weak to stand up to a brute terrorizing the few remaining residents. It is based upon a novel by the same name by E. L. Doctorow. Plot. 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. Production. "Welcome to Hard Times" was filmed on location at the Conejo Ranch in Thousand Oaks, California and the MGM backlot in Culver City, California. Reception. Initial reception. Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" thought Aldo Ray's performance was "fascinating and hypnotizing": "I would guess, in all his times in Western movies, Mr. Fonda has never seen a more wild and implausible badman than this jughead whom Mr. Ray plays. Not only does he knock the tops off bottles instead  of pulling out the corks when he wants to guzzle a couple of quarts of whisky (that's a standard badman ploy), but he ravishes bar girls, shoots his own horse and guns down Elisha Cook Jr. with even more cold-blooded arrogance than Jack Palance did in "Shane"." "Variety" panned the film with contempt for Kennedy's "inept" direction and script. It dismissed Rule's performance as "unsatisfactory", comparing it to a "Method school version" of the iconic Western-movie star Maureen O'Hara. Though taking note of the star-studded supporting cast—noting Edgar Buchanan's performance as the  best among them, and giving credit for "comic relief" to Wynn and the saloon girls—"Variety" said the collection of "many pro names" simply underscored a "lack of depth and perception" by the "script and direction." The cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr. was highly regarded. Modern reception. The movie continues to be critiqued by some reviewers as being awkward and unsettling, with an ending that is unsatisfying (even "nihilistic"). While noting there is not a consensus among reviewers, "Rotten Tomatoes" audience scores it at 39%. However, one modern reviewer describes it as "better than average" for a Western. Craig Butler in  the "All Movie Guide" notes that the movie "tends to divide audiences" along the lines of whether or not they are expecting, and preferring, a conventional Western (virtue triumphs through justifiable violence), or are attracted to a very contradictory type of movie. For the latter, Butler contends the film offers much "to ponder and to study", but notes that the movie is a "downer" that arguably puts most of its effort into conveying a "message" rather than providing entertainment. Butler describes the film as a revisionist Western, typical of the 1960s, disassembling the classic Western, and reassembling it in ways  that did not always follow the traditions of the genre. Butler makes positive comments about the performances of Fonda, Ray, Wynn, Oates, Buchanan, Paige and Pyle. "Time Out" concurs that the supporting cast is "immaculate" and notes Fonda's performance as "intriguing".