MartinHafer 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. What will Blue do? And, will you still be watching it by the time this EXTREMELY muddled ending occurs?!I have rarely seen a western that seemed to have no idea what it was talking about and left the viewers THIS confused and unsatisfied. The final scenes just seemed random and pointless--and most of it due to Fonda's confusing character. A seriously disappointing film that could easily have been better.

romanorum1 A strange man from Bodie (Aldo Ray) rides into a jerkwater town that he proceeds to terrorize. He tortures the local prostitute in a saloon, kills a man who tries to help, clubs the barkeep with a bottle, shoots his own exhausted horse, steals another, kills the owner, etc. He even takes over the town Indian's tepee, drinks his hot coffee directly from the fire pot, and eats his corn off the stalk. The psychopath then burns down the town before he rides away on his stolen horse. 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 is not successful, but so aren't the docile town citizens, who number about 15 or 20. Blue has to salvage what's left, and it isn't much. Could the burning town and "Bodie's" savage laughter be symbolic of hell and Satan? There is some rebuilding, but you know the stranger will be back (Don't they always return?). Aldo Ray plays one of the most effective mean roles in western cinema history, i.e. without the need for dialog. His hulking presence is enough. 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. We know that the old time lawmakers – Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Temple Houston, Charlie Siringo, Pat Garrett, Heck Thomas, Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen, and the rest – did what they had to do. And these folks did not die until the 20th century, and Madsen lived to be nearly 100! The law was well-enforced even by the Hollywood cowboys – W.S. Hart (who knew the real West), Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Johnny Mack Brown, Gene Autry, and many others. The typical scenario was like this: First, the bad guy did his dastardly deed and initially got away with the crime. Next, the good guy gathered evidence and was soon hot on his trail. Then came the inevitable result: the hoosegow or Boot Hill. Welcome to Hard Times is thus strange indeed. For not only did it take away the persona of the hero, but it also gave the bad guy an egocentric place in the overall setting. It may even have helped to give rise to the western anti-hero (á la Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and others). This movie was filmed in 1966, but not released until the following year. For a long time the old-style western was never the same except mainly for the Duke's work in the 1960s and 1970s. The genre today has not really come back.This off-beat western is supported by a very competent and incredibly well-stocked supporting cast (although they are mostly wasted). Old timers like Edgar Buchanan, Keenan Wynn, John Anderson, Warren Oates, Denver Pyle, Janis Paige and the rest are always a delight to watch. The cinematography is fine, and the dancing girls are attractive enough. But the movie itself just could not represent the real West!

rooster_davis I love Westerns. I have watched dozens of them and I continue to watch every one that comes on that I haven't seen. (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. "Is everything all right?" "No, there is a man coming up the stairs who wants to kill us all." "Don't worry, I'm calling the police right away." Whew! Close one! And how preferable it is to have the police arrive in ten minutes, with a killer ten seconds away, than to have any means of actually defending oneself. Right? It is THAT level of self-imposed helplessness that afflicts the people of the town in this movie. They stand by, afraid to do anything for fear that it might be wrong. And you can bet, if they DO do anything, it WILL be wrong, so best not to ever defend yourself or try and stop a bad guy. 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. They did not stand by in horror, clutching a copy of Consumer Reports and watching as the women were raped and the town was burned. The person who wrote this trash movie has no clue what this country used to be about. 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 not realistic, it is not dramatic, it is not riveting, it is not honest. 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. Here, he is nothing but a complete power failure.Someone commented that Fonda's character was much more realistic than the type played by say Clint Eastwood. I totally disagree. Perhaps there is nobody as-such we can point to from history who was exactly what Eastwood portrayed, but look at the famous sheriffs and marshals and gunfights and bad guys who are well-recorded in history. Where are the pacifist hand-wringers? History did not note them, because they were nothing that anyone would want to remember. 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. Can this be a serious attempt at a Western movie? It is a sad, pathetic joke of a movie, designed to push a pacifist viewpoint from the perspective of someone who knows more about tofu than about the old West.I hate this movie. Have I made that fact clear? This movie is GARBAGE. Thank you and good night.

moonspinner55 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. Although the story sounds promising, this cheapjack execution is not, and Ray (despite some cackling) has no character to play and virtually no dialogue. 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. Janice Rule plays a traumatized saloon hostess with an Irish brogue that comes and goes, and poor Lon Chaney (Jr.) has a miserable excuse for a role as an alcoholic bartender. Fonda is stalwart, as usual, but the surroundings have no atmosphere and Burt Kennedy's direction has absolutely no artistry (he points the camera and shoots). Some incidentals in the theme bring to mind the later "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean", but that film was more ambitious and engrossing than this extremely modest underachiever. * from ****