NOT a Ray of light

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES—no kidding. If this isn’t the worst western of 1967, it’s only because it vies to be the worst of the decade. E.L. Doctorow’s 224 page 1960 novel, his first, drew rave reviews and was one of those revisionist ‘new looks at the old’ that flooded the period. Trying to wade thru his 1975 opus “Ragtime” turned me off to his approach and style (not salvaged by yawning thru the 1981 film version) enough that picking up his debut tome is at the tail end of a long list of “maybe, next life” jots. That admitted, we’ll take the high road and presume it must’ve had enough trueish grit to attract writer-director Burt Kennedy and star Henry Fonda to commit filming this six years later. Intended for TV, deemed too violent (like 1964’s The Killers—this is way worse, and a ton less fun) it instead slunk into theaters on May 1st of ’67. Bad reviews and public rejection (118th place, $1,5oo,000) slapped it back onto TV six months later, the swiftest turnaround ever (the prehistoric days before streaming and instant dissatisfaction). I first watched it as a 12-year-old, around when I started compiling lists of movies (the 17-pound Royal typewriter days), rating them from zero to 100. The original list is gone with Democracy but something similar to memory hints ‘Welcome‘ got maybe a 10. Seen fresh a mere 58 years later and whaddya know—the kid was right the first time. *

‘The Man From Bodie’ (Aldo Ray), embodiment of pure malice, swaggers into the Dakota Territory hamlet of ‘Hard Times’ (so absurdly sparse it makes the town in Shane look like Boston), rapes, murders and then burns the place to the ground. He’s so gross that he bashes open bottles of whiskey (apparently he can chug glass), so diabolical he shoots his own horse. Sated, he rides off cackling, leaving the stunned survivors to ponder their collective cowardice. Later, after new arrivals (complete with a gaggle of knockout hookers—so much for revisionist frontier realism) help rebuild the burg The Man returns for a fresh rampage. By the time the vicious, boring and flat-out stupid 103 minutes cease wheezing and croak, you may feel the sort of fool-fueled rage as Ray’s character, for the moviemakers who dumped off this manure load of phony masochistic barf. Burt Kennedy wrote some neat Randolph Scott westerns. His later directorial record swung between hits to 3rd base (The War Wagon, also ’67) and Support Your Local Sheriff and satisfactory lopes to 2nd (The Rounders), to bunts (Return Of The Seven, The Train Robbers, The Good Guys And The Bad Guys) and then humiliating strike-outs (Hannie Caulder, The Deserter). This punk whimpers at the bottom of the dugout, and is especially galling for dragging a great cast team. Besides Fonda (the lamest character he ever played), among the pros vainly doing what they can are Janice Rule (with an iffy Irish accent; she’s assaulted, burned and in the idiotic finale, killed), Keenan Wynn (killed by mistake), Warren Oates (murdered), Janis Paige, Fay Spain (raped, murdered) and Arlene Golonka.

Hold your fire, Warren, “The Wild Bunch” is on the horizon

With John Anderson, Michael Shea, Edgar Buchanan, Lon Chaney Jr. (ironically playing a bartender, so haggard he makes Broderick Crawford look like Robert Redford), Elisha Cook Jr. (murdered in the mud, similar to but worse than in Shane), Paul Fix (keels from a heart attack over indignation from everyone being such total wusses), Denver Pyle, Alan Baxter, Paul Birch (murdered), Royal Dano, Ann McCrea (done doing neighbor ‘Midge Kelsey’ on The Donna Reed Show, here the prostitute raped & murdered at the start of the first rampage), Kalen Liu and Chuck Roberson.

When in doubt, put Fay Spain into a bath scene

* Fonda, on how Kennedy “and I went into it with a great deal of enthusiasm, meaning we committed ourselves to the project based on the strength of our mutual enthusiasm for the book…It didn’t work as a picture, but I wasn’t surprised because by the time we got to the production I knew it wouldn’t.”

Insulting injury—Doctorow on Ragtime: “a brilliant movie for the first 10 minutes, but unfortunately it goes on.” Maybe he should have been a reviewer instead of a novelist. To give him credit, he called Welcome To Hard Times “the second worst film ever made. The worst was Swamp Fire.” Bemused, we tracked down (or into) Swamp Fire, a gob of 1946 dopiness with Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe fighting over dames in the bayous. It’s not really the worst ever made (E.L. was kiddin’) but for darn sure is one stinky crawdad, “Coming to a Ala Index near you!”

The repellent ‘Hard’ and its unwelcome squander of a fine cast had the added debit of driving Yours Tireless to dig up reviews of the source book. OMG, a gold mine of belabored interpretative overkill so pretentiously rhapsodic it makes you reconsider the wisdom of that just-kill-me-already song “Suicide Is Painless” from TVs MASH.