The Fever Film Club #8
Hud (1963)
written by Fever Film Club Guest Contributor: Tom Prassis
100 Movies You Should See Before We All Die
“In our society, there’s always been a fascination with the ‘charming’ villain, and we wanted to say that if something’s corrupt, it’s still corrupt, no matter how charming it might seem. Even if it’s Paul Newman with his beautiful blue eyes. But things didn’t work out like we planned.”
— Screenwriter Harriet Frank, Jr.
This club convenes remotely as a public service while social distancing.
Tom Prassis writes:
Paul Schrader recently posted on FB that he had showed his daughter Hud, a movie which he claims to watch often. “I suspect Hud is the first modern film antihero,” he writes. “There were many flawed protagonists before but there was always a caveat: his upbringing, his social situation, his comeuppance, the girl who loves him, his redemption, his remorse, his punishment. Hud has none of those. He is just a bad apple (however charismatic). He shows no remorse, no concern for others, no sense of justice.”
I hadn’t seen the movie since it came out in 1963, and as a pubertal thirteen year old what really struck me were the steamy scenes with Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. I even blotted out the rape scene. (In the book on which the movie is based the Neal character, who is the housekeeper, is Black.) So, I decided to revisit Hud to see what I had missed.
Hud is the freewheeling son of the owner of a small struggling cattle ranch. He thinks his father hates him because years earlier he got drunk and ran the car off the road, killing his brother. But the father tells him he didn’t like him even before that. “You’re an unprincipled man,” the father (wonderfully played by Melvin Douglas) tells him. Still, his dead brother’s son (Brandon de Wilde, of Shane fame, who would years later die in a car crash) looks up to Hud. A womanizer who works as little as possible, Hud thinks he’s entitled to the ranch after hoof and mouth disease wipes out the entire herd. He wants to sell it to oil speculators but his father is having none of it.
The movie is based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, Horseman, Pass By, which is a phrase taken from the epitaph Yeats wrote for himself (“Cast a cold Eye On Life, On Death. Horseman, pass by.”). It’s shot in black and white, courtesy of the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, who won his second Oscar for this film. Howe imbues the images with a warm hue, evocative of the dry, dusty dirt locale in cattle country Texas.
Schrader calls Hud an “amoral hero.” “A man like that sounds no better than a heel,” Neal says to Newman’s father at one point. Still, as Schrader stresses, you keep looking for that caveat in Hud but it never comes. His final gesture in the last scene places an exclamation on that. No actor could touch Newman back then. Two years earlier his performance as “Fast” Eddie Felson in The Hustler was called “legend making.” He was a character actor movie star (the equivalent today would probably be Brad Pitt). Newman blamed himself for people reacting positively to his character in Hud. He thought he had made him too “appealing.” But the “greed is good” devil-may-care attitude that Hud affected was starting to fester in 1963, and audiences were all too eager to root for him. In this respect Hud is not only a mirror of its time; in retrospect, it foreshadows today’s avaricious and laissez-faire culture in which wealth inequality is rampant.
Hud’s director, Martin Ritt, blacklisted in the 1950s, was known as a socially progressive filmmaker (Hombre or Norma Rae anyone?). His passion for expressing the struggles of inequality were instilled in him when he attended college in North Carolina where the stark contrasts of the Depression-Era South, against his New York City upbringing, formed his progressive foundation. However, it was the screenwriters, the wife and husband team of Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, who actually shaped the film. They were mostly known for having adapted the novels of William Faulkner, but collaborated with Ritt on eight of his films, and with Newman on three of his. Below is a link to what they had to say in 2003 about the character they had written and how society has (de)evolved.
Watching this movie on a small laptop computer is disrespectful to cinema. Phones are out of the question. Hyperlinks appear below.
How to watch the movie:
justwatch.com — Stream, Rent, Buy, watch here, watch now
deepdiscount.com — don’t buy the DVD; it’s an import from Australia
Screenwriters Ravetch and Frank on Hud:
Hollywood Elsewhere
Find out about Hud:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about the Director, Martin Ritt:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about the Director of Photography, James Wong Howe:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Paul Newman:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Patricia Neal:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By:
Wikipedia
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