People are voting emotionally.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The review by rooster-davis is perfect, except that one star is generous. If I could give less than one star, I would. This was the worst piece of c..p I ever saw, bar none! I wasted one hour and 45 minutes of my life, with no redeeming value. Henry Fonda should never have done this movie. I HAD respect for him, at least, as an actor. Since I'm required to have ten lines of text in this review, I'll continue by saying that this was a very bad movie. Not only was it bad, it was ugly. There will be no reason for it to ever be shown again. And, furthermore, considering that my wife saw it with me, SHE thought it was the worst movie she'd ever seen END

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 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.

This is the type of film that was made to make a statement, and it builds the tension in a very efficient way. Never mind that Aldo Ray has no reason to be so cruel, let's pretend that he is totally crazy. What about Henry Fonda? To be so pacifist and calm when all his world is being destroyed makes you also think that he is kind of a lunatic. Janice Rule as the woman who gets angry with Fonda's attitude creates the main conflict. The last moments of this film are a total letdown. It would be very important to have a dialogue between Fonda and Janice at that time, then the statement of the film would come through. Unfortunately that does not happen.