Rough road following Easy Rider By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Jan. 7, 2019

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/01/2019 (2138 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After the surprise success of their 1969 movie Easy Rider, stars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda each released a self-directed movie in 1971, neither of which matched Easy Rider’s game-changing impact.

Hopper, who directed Easy Rider, made The Last Movie, an artsy bit of self-indulgence in which he plays a stunt wrangler who quits the business after a stuntman is killed on the set of a western being shot in Peru.

His character, Kansas, subsequently becomes embroiled in different kind of movie project in which native Peruvians turn the filmmaking process into a kind of stylized ritual of violence and spectacle.

Fonda directed and starred in a real western, The Hired Hand, in which he stars with the late, great Warren Oates.

The two play old friends who run afoul of a corrupt town boss (Severn Darden) before Fonda’s character decides to return to the wife (Verna Bloom) he left years earlier.

But instead of resuming their relationship, he is put in the titular role of a hired hand, before a climactic reckoning with Darden’s character.

Both films employed the top cinematographers of the day, both Hungarian-Americans: The Last Movie was shot by Laszlo Kovacs and The Hired Hand was shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. Both are visually stunning.

It’s understandable how it was that Cinematheque programmed Hopper’s movie (it plays every Tuesday at 7 p.m. for the rest of January).

While it’s a tough slog to watch, it represents the experimental spirit of the late-1960s/early ‘70s epoch of filmmaking. Indeed, it was greenlit by Universal Studios with the specific intention of giving young filmmakers a shot at expressing themselves unfettered by studio chiefs and beancounters.

Watching the film today, a couple of things are clear. Hopper was frequently high during the making of the film and by all accounts, he was pretty messed up for the editing process as well. Hopper doesn’t skimp on shooting footage of himself emoting and silently suffering endlessly.

Yet it has some value for cineastes in its depiction of how Hollywood movies were shot in that time. Sam Fuller essentially plays himself as a crusty Hollywood director who rules his set with an iron fist.

Some of the film sees Hopper interact with both the relics of old Hollywood and new up-and-comers, including Michelle Phillips (to whom Hopper was married for eight days!), Kris Kristofferson, who sings Me and Bobby McGee, and future members of David Lynch’s repertory troupe, Dean Stockwell and Russ Tamblyn.

For my money, Fonda’s The Hired Hand is the far superior film, and as luck would have it, it just got a new Blu-ray release from

Arrow Video. As a director, Fonda offered up a touch of rebellion in the movie’s laconic pacing. But he more or less stuck to the solid script by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp (Night Moves, Ulzana’s Raid).

If The Last Movie boasted soundtrack contributions from Kristofferson, the dulcimer-heavy music of The Hired Hand by Bruce Langhorne is hypnotic, evocative and — as much as you may love Me and Bobby McGee — actually appropriate to the story.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
Reporter

In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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