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Harry Collings (Peter Fonda) walks out on his wife (Verna Bloom) to become a drifter. After several aimless years of wandering the sagebrush with his saddle-pal Arch Harris (Warren Oates), he returns home to a deserted spouse who will only accept him on her own terms—as the hired help.
Alan Sharp's understated laid-back western screenplay deliberately downplays its potentially dramatic turns of events and is languidly filmed by Fonda with Vilmos Zsigmond's shimmering cinematography and Bruce Langhome's gentle, rural-themed music. Curiously, Fonda showed his cameraman John Ford's My Darling Clementine starring his father Henry Fonda, for visual inspiration.
The critically acclaimed but commercially disastrous western was produced by Fonda's company Pando for Universal (the organisation that had worked such marketing wonders with Two-Lane Blacktop and Minnie and Moskowitz) at a time when the studio briefly tinkered with the notion of chasing the youth market that had been tapped with the release of Easy Rider (1969).