Hud (1963) — Paul Newman Leads a Drama Rich With Nuance and Emotion

Will: Hud. With Paul Newman. We watched it.

Sam: And I liked it. A lot. I dare say it’s up there with Klute.

Will: This was art. It almost felt more like a play at moments… it had a maturity and depth beyond most films we’ve seen so far, even the great ones.

Sam: Again though, it’s not a film that crops up often. I think there are several Newman films that would be brought up before this one.

Will: Partly because of the film’s weight I think. Cool Hand Luke is dark in places, but it also shows Newman as glorious — which sticks in the mind of audiences. Hud is far heavier.

Sam: His pairings with Robert Redford are fun, but fairly lightweight.

Will: Hud also, and forgive me for getting deep a bit quickly, asks hard questions of ‘America’ as a concept. It’s an uncomfortable film in some respects, and would be especially more so for a Cold War era American audience I think.

Sam: So the film is set in small town Texas, where Paul Newman is the son of an old school cattle rancher. He’s a womaniser and an alcoholic, who resents being trapped in the town.

Will: The film is centred on their household. In addition to Hud and his father, Homer, there is Hud’s nephew, Lonnie, a gentle teenager, and the housekeeper, Alma, who is clever, assertive and undeniably sexy — though she isn’t trying to be. When their herd of cattle are imperilled by foot and mouth disease, the household are placed under pressure, and we watch them struggle through the questions that arise.

Sam: And struggle they do. You get the sense that the household was a powder keg waiting to explode. There has been a painful incident in the past that hangs over the characters… marked by the absence of Lonnie’s father.

Will: One of the most obvious triumphs of the films is the quality of the performances. Each of the four are perfect, and Oscars for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were given to Melvyn Douglas, for Homer, and Patrica Neal, for Alma, as a result. I almost wished that the four of them could have become an ensemble, and made loads of films together. Together they formed a perfectly honed dramatic machine!

Sam: I’d like to shine a light on the opening scene. It was absolutely phenomenal. It follows Lonnie as he arrives in town early one morning searching for Hud. He follows this trail of destruction through the town until he finds him at the local vet’s house, where Hud has been spending the night with the vet’s wife. You hear so much about Hud before you see him. It’s similar to the early scenes of Silence of the Lambs where they paint this terrifying image of Hannibal Lecter before you see him.

Will: It’s also concise storytelling — Lonnie’s looking for him because there’s an urgent problem. It immediately kicks off the plot, and shows Hud’s character at its worst — selfish, detached, quietly angry — and Lonnie’s at its best — obliging, honest, responsible.

Sam: Around the same time Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars was claimed to have created the ‘anti-hero’: a character who does very dubious things whilst also being someone you’re meant to root for. Arguably Paul Newman was doing the same with Hud. In fact, if you dropped the character into the Old West, he would be the hero. His masculinity would be rewarded. But in this time and setting, he’s out of place.

Will: You’re definitely right that Hud is a man meant for an earlier, rougher time… but he’s also positioned as a dangerous new type of a man. His father, Homer, is a depression-era American — he’s tough, doesn’t take anything for granted, and believes in frugality… but Hud is a feckless waster in comparison. In a sense, he’s a ‘modern man’ — a sign that America’s morality is weakening into post-war self-indulgence. The interesting thing is that the film accidentally anticipated the counter-cultural revolution of the sixties, and audiences loved Hud’s sexy anti-authority attitude. The filmmakers wanted us to look down on Hud, but young Americans of the sixties just couldn’t see why they should. Apparently Paul Newman himself was surprised that fans chose to have posters of Hud on their bedroom walls.

Sam: He was the Tyler Durden of the 1960s. The death of the West is a traditional theme in so many Westerns, and this felt like an extension of that. A slow decline of the traditional ways of life. There’s a criticism of globalisation early on where Alma mentions the absurdity of oranges being grown in Florida and shipped to Texas. The times they are-a changin’.

Will: And I think Hud will struggle in the changes, as ‘modern’ as he might seem. He might be cool and sexually successful, but he’s still a small-town guy who has only ever worked on a cattle ranch. I feel very strongly that the counter-cultural explosion of the sixties is going to unnerve Hud, and that he’s going to stay unnerved right through the seventies. I believe Hud is going to finally be at peace in Reagan’s 1980s — that mixture of individualism and social conservatism is going to suit him fine. I can picture him in his fifties, with a beer gut and a moral looseness that’s lost the excuse of young beauty, but gained the excuse of wealth instead. At one point Homer says to Lonnie, ‘Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire’, and the truth of that almost leaps off the screen.

Sam: I never got the sense Hud desired change, as miserable as his life may seem.

Will: In 1963 Hud might seem like someone worth looking up to, charismatic charmer that he is, but the Huds of this world are then going to lead Americans away from Homer’s wise, unsexy rootedness, and straight to Reagan’s celebration of unquestioning self-indulgence… and then, thirty years later, to the almost inevitable consequence of that pro-greed amorality — the brute immorality of Donald Trump. Homer’s negative feelings about Hud feel unfatherly and cruel, but are founded in wisdom. A sort of wisdom that America and the world have been foolish to forget.

Sam: Alma — the housekeeper — felt like a surrogate mother to Hud and Lonnie. Not so because of her age, but because of Hud’s child-like behaviour. You can imagine her needing to put Hud to bed on a nightly basis after he staggers home smashed.

Will: There’s a moment where Hud says ‘My momma loved me but she died’. He says it glibly, as a joke, but it resonated so strongly with me. I think on some level Hud is articulating his direct truth: ‘The person that loved me was taken away when I was too young, and so I remain a trapped emotional child. No one was here to walk me into adulthood.’ It’s painful to hear.

Sam: Indeed.

Will: Going back to Alma, it’s interesting how she’s motherly, but also very sensual. Both Hud and Lonnie fancy their chances with her, but they express and experience that so very differently. It’s a very odd dynamic — this weird mixture of familial and sexual, all overlapped and muddled.

Sam: And although she spends every moment engaged in domestic toil, she’s still very much a ‘modern woman’ — she’s witty and sarcastic, and at times has a flirtatious relationship with Hud. It’s a rich dynamic. She’s damaged too, as she was once in an abusive relationship: ‘I’ve already done my time with one cold-hearted bastard’. It’s understandable why she’s content with her station in life.

Will: There’s something affecting about how accepting she seems to be. Her intelligence and charisma mean that you can’t help but think very highly of her, but at a fundamental level she expects men to hurt her, and expects to sustain herself through badly paid domestic labour. Something is wrong here. Society is not as it should be. Maybe, despite everything I’ve said about the film being essentially conservative and retrospective looking, Alma’s character shows that things need to change. A social revolution is necessary to stop such brilliant souls from being shrunken and hurt like this.

Sam: Absolutely. And when Hud inevitably behaves badly towards her, in the scene in which we see him at his worst, there’s not a huge blow-up. It’s more the sense of: ‘Boys will be boys’.

Will: Changing the subject here, but I think it’s also worth pointing out how fantastically the film is shot. The sparse Texan landscape is shot in a way that really conveys the place, but it was the faces that I found the most striking. Apparently they were lit from below, which gives them this bright visual clarity. When characters convey emotion through their expressions, the camera caught it all.

Sam: True.

Will: The film ends pessimistically in a sense — Hud has not changed morally, and given the prospect of there being oil beneath their land, seems on route to easy riches. Yet the film gives us hope through the character of Lonnie, who, in the process of deciding what sort of man he wants to be, decides that Hud is not a fit role-model. We’re left feeling that Hud-like amorality might rule their day, but we can also hope that the next generation chooses a different path.

Sam: Well it sounds like it’s another film we both adored.

Will: What can I say? This film is one of the best I’ve ever seen and I’m not afraid to say it!

Sam: Up there with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit?

Will: Hey, The Visit might be a found-footage horror, but I did stand up after it finished and declare ‘That is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen!’ You can’t argue with that.

Sam: I was there.

Films Referenced

A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1967)

Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015)

The Next Film: Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967)