Welcome to Hard Times (1967)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Excellent but underrated film

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

I had managed to ride clear of Hard Times for many years, but gave in when TCM screened it this week. Such a pity to see Burt Kennedy's name on this woeful film. Then it's such a pity to see anyones name on this film! Not that the poor quality print TCM have helped any, nor did TCMs awful Automatic Sound Level Control - with all it's unnecessary HISS that comes up during the quite scenes or between spoken dialog! When will they ever correct this, and get it right in Aust...?? From some posts, there must be a lot of easily pleased viewers out there. This made for TV Pilot, was not even good enough for TV, let alone Cinema. Just another of those shocking films that helped send MGM to the wolves. The writer of the book must have wanted to 'shoot' the producers after he saw it. This is the type of 'evil' (now called dark) rubbish that copycat film maker Eastwood has re-made endlessly following his Spagetti films...and his are no better than this - just made with more money, and more psycho's!Difficult to find much worth saying about any of it. It wasted: Fonda, Rule, Ray, Spain, and several better than average supporting stars like Fix, Birch, etc. A very good D.O.P. could not even save this trite treatment Such a pity.

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.

I had high hopes for this, but wound up despising it. This is pacifism with a broad brush, absolutely sophomoric in it's persistent delivering of the kind of message that makes "turn the other cheek" resemble heroism.I just hope impressionable children are not being exposed to this defeatist philosophy.Pushing this movie's obvious message to kids is like passing around the bubonic plague.The actors are first-rate but are squandered here in my opinion.In WWII actors flew bombers or fought for their country on the beaches and were slogging along in the infantry for years in dangerous terrain. Regrettably, things have deeply changed in the USA. Hollywood has become the mouthpiece of the left. 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.

I kept waiting for this bad movie to move beyond its stock characters and hackneyed plot, but it never made it. We have floozies with hearts of gold, grizzled old-timers, cowardly townspeople, and an over-the-top Aldo Ray playing evil incarnate. 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. One plot gimmick after another is thrown in, evidently just to fill up some screen time, when more time might have been spent developing the characters of the townspeople.