In 2001, a fully restored version was shown at various film festivals, gaining strong critical praise, and it was released by the Sundance Channel on DVD.

The three of them stop off in Del Norte, a ramshackle town in the middle of nowhere that, unbeknowns to the trio, is run by a corrupt boss named McVey.

Arch and Dan discuss traveling to California to look for work when Harry abruptly informs them that he has grown weary of purposeless wandering and has decided to return to his home, wife, and daughter that he had left seven years before.

Harry and Arch ostensibly accept the tale and leave the town to bury their friend, but they return at dawn seeking revenge.

Due to the huge financial success of Easy Rider (1969), which Fonda co-wrote, produced and starred in, Universal Studios gave him full artistic control over The Hired Hand, his debut as a director.

Frank Mazzola edited the film, using a series of complex and poetic montages, which featured elaborate dissolves, slow motion and overlapping still photography.

Fonda recalled "Universal was going to put up a billboard on Sunset Blvd., showing me without a shirt, wearing a cowboy hat and a pistol stuffed in my pants.

"[2] The Hired Hand received generally mixed reviews, with some critics dismissing The Wife of Martin Guerre-like film as a "hippie-western.

"[5] But Roger Greenspun of The New York Times praised it as a "rather ambitious simple movie, with a fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning rising to the mystical, which seems so much a part of the very contemporary old West.

[8] Bill Kauffman has called it "a lovely meditation on friendship and responsibility, one of the least-known great movies of that richest of all cinematic eras, the early 1970s.

"[11] When NBC-TV first aired The Hired Hand in 1973, they reinstated twenty minutes of footage that Fonda had deleted from the theatrical cut as "extraneous".

Glenn Erickson has argued that the previously missing footage is very important to the film's narrative, noting that "writer Alan Sharp created a pressing reason for Oates' character to take his leave", and further opined that these twenty minutes helped make The Hired Hand more strongly resemble "a standard film with a story, events, dialogue and character interaction.

"[12] The most substantial excision involved the death of Ed Plummer (Michael McClure), and the subsequent homicide investigation by the local sheriff (Larry Hagman).