HUD
DIRECTED BY: MARTIN RITT - WRITTEN BY LARRY MCMURTRY, IRVING RAVETCH, HARRIET FRANK
STARRING: PAUL NEWMAN, PATRICIA NEAL, BRANDON DEWILDE, MELVYN DOUGLAS
ACADEMY AWARDS: CINEMATOGRAPHY, BEST ACTRESS, BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - RELEASED I963

Books and films are always trying to advise us how to identify the good guys from the bad guys. But because a character's inner life is hard to show, the villains are often more interesting than the starched good folks. Examples of films that backfired are A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson and perhaps most famously, Hud, starring Paul Newman.

Hud is one of Paul Newman's many films which take place below the Mason-Dixon line. Just as Hemingway did for a previous generation, so Tennessee Williams and Larry McMurtry caught the imagination of Newman's generation. Beginning with A Streetcar Named Desire (I947), and continuing through the I960s, the South (including Texas) was conceived of as a vast land of the id, where characters said and did things that the rest of conformist America wouldn't dream of doing. An easy visualization of Hollywood's view; the Mason-Dixon line was America's belt, putting the South in an erogenous zone. All kinds of actors had to learn to accent their filmed dialogue with a southern dialect, or face losing good parts. Sometimes it seems that they're all one film, with Big Daddys, plantation houses, shotgun shacks, huge convertible cars, and other embellishments of life in Dixie.

Brandon DeWilde plays Lon Bannon, a sensitive teenager representing author Larry McMurtry's alter ego, when he wrote Horseman, Pass By. Lon's main role is witness for the prosecution, and he stands in for all the youths who've had to deal with dysfunctional families and narcissistic parents and family members. The other two members of the Bannon clan are Homer (Melvyn Douglas) a paterfamilias out of the old testament who loves ranching and hates the stink of oilwells; and Hud; Alma (Patricia Neal), is the family's household cook and cleaning woman, heart, and object of Hud's desires when he happens to be home. She turns his advances down, until he breaks down and pleads that he'll buy her a box of candy. Her comeback: "How about some wampum and colored beads too".

Is it a coincidence that Hud's name rhymes with stud? Paul Newman plays one of the more tough-guy parts of his long career. He's the opposite extreme of the character he played in 1958's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He's very much in the mode of Ben Quick, the fast talking conman Newman plays, who captivates Joanne Woodword in Long Hot Summer (also 1958). In Hud, a much better film, he chases women with the single-mindedness of a buck in rut, and what he chases, he generally gets, because he's the alpha male of his small patch in Texas. To be an alpha male in Texas is a whole different league, with Saturday nights reserved for bar-fights. You sense immense toughness in Hud, body and soul, a man who has shoveled a lot of cow-paddies out of the barn in his time.

If you're a guy, what's not to like - Hud drives a Caddy convertible with big fins, wears cowboy duds, dishes it out - but rarely takes it, except from Alma, and has winning ways with the ladies. He's a scoundrel, but he's an all-American good-old-boy cowboy scoundrel - so he gets a pass from most of his cohorts and Lon. The filmmakers avoid giving him any dialogue or actions that will destroy our grudging admiration of him, because of the well-known rule that says the lead must be liked or the audience will walk out. Only in the third act is he shown pulling some stunts that cross the line.

Alma would make Hud a good wife or at least girlfriend, but he sees her as a convenient object of his desires on the ranch and nothing more. She likes him, but as she tells him, "I've already had one cold-hearted bastard in my life", her ex, who sharpened her wits by leaving her stranded with no money and no credit card. And how much fun would it be to start something with Hud, and then be stuck in a lonely ranch-house with him all day and night? Many less principled country gals of that era would just keep quiet and start a whispering campaign behind his back. Instead she's given great sarcastic lines to kick Hud with, which she delivers with aplomb, although he barely notices. He's too busy thinking up (or repeating) his own lines, like, "Subtract the sinners from the saints and you're lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln."

Hud constructs a moral dilemma for the Bannons when a few of the cattle come down with hoof-and-mouth disease, as diagnosed by the nice-guy government agricultural agent, who says the whole herd will have to be destroyed before the disease spreads. Hud's and Homer's reaction to the crisis provide the picture's backbone. However, picking hoof-and-mouth disease as the crux of the story might be a bit esoteric for city-dwellers; although the climax of the story is not without drama. One of the ranch hands gives his sardonic take on the calamity, "looks like I landed in the wrong place - again".

But the viewer doesn't feel that way. The film takes you into the middle of this family of well portrayed characters who will stick in your memory for a while; - unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool city dweller and hate country ways no matter how they're presented. Patricia Neal was one of the great actresses of her day and she won an Academy Award for her role as Alma. Melvyn Douglas won the second Oscar for his fine portrayal of a man who loved the land.

Hud is about America; and the many Hud-like characters that inhabit her vast interior. Considering that America and Texas' own President Lyndon Baines Johnson was just about to step into the steel-trap of the Viet Nam conflict, the filmmakers weren't too far off. Since Hud deals in part with money issues and oil wells, it can be guessed the take-away message there too. Perhaps if America had decided to get off its oil addiction then, it wouldn't have to rush the process now.

The character of Alma is possibly Patricia Neal's finest performance; as the only character with emotions beyond disgust and detestation, she does a fine job of hitting a home run for women, although her part was partly symbolic in nature. There are also some arty hints of Greek tragedy salted in as a seasoning.

The third Academy Award the film did snag was to James Wong Howe for cinematography, in black and white, which is as spare and beautiful as the land and the words of the people on it. Howes instructions from the director; something like "nothing glamorous" or "don't make Hud look good" were followed; but the results fed into a whole new documentary look that was gaining momentum at the time. The film was nominated in four other categories, including best direction and best actor for Paul Newman. The tag-line given the film in I963 was, "The man with the barb-wire soul". The film is very spare and unforgiving in it's way, but it for once caught the feel of the real country, not some city-slicker's conception of it; i.e., people sitting around playing banjos or involved in gunplay, etc. Watch Hud and then you may understand the loves and hates of certain recent politicians from Texas.


Scenes from the movie: Interpretation of the Law