Wonderfully daft piece of movie-making that actually grows worse with age, "Welcome to Hard Times" is a presumably honest description of the feeling author E L Doctorow experienced when viewing the Burt Kennedy screen version of his work.<br /><br />By turns jaunty, tedious, unfathomable and unwatchable, it actually suffers from a greater absence of structure than the town it purports to chronicle, a place which keeps being, er, burned down by a laughing madman who no-one can stop because he's A Symbol.<br /><br />Most of the time, of course, this doesn't matter, because Kennedy thinks he's directing a musical, a sort of Seven Whores for Seven Miners, as a result of which one scene after another has dancing girls a-dancing and drinking men a-drinking, all of this to the accompaniment of a music score that if not played by someone tone-deaf was certainly written by one.<br /><br />Script felicities are many and varied, though none is more rewarding than the scene where Fonda is told that the mine -- upon whose fortunes the town depends -- has just closed, after which he immediately begs his adopted son to settle down in this selfsame place of doom and earn himself an education instead of playing around with guns.<br /><br />Logic, right.<br /><br />When it's not being burned down, the town -- a tent and two wood-frame buildings whose Nouvelle Vague minimalism is echoed by a cemetery with just one grave -- is regularly assailed by Janice Rule's hilarious Irish accent, though she certainly gets her just desserts (as indeed, do nearly all the cast, shot down either accidentally or deliberately in a climax so stupefyingly barmy that you wonder if Russ Meyer assumed the direction after Kennedy took an errant slug.)<br /><br />With a budget to die for -- well, no self-respecting production designer could contemplate living on the money allocated here -- "Welcome to Hard Times" inadvertently delivers so much in the way of good times that it seems uncharitable to criticise.<br /><br />But then, my name isn't Doctorow.