the epitome of this moment at this crossroads of ours, a brief homage

Hud—the Hunk, the Real Boogeyman

the white American, the white Texan

Larry McMurtry is a writer who grew up in Texas.   Over the last 60 years, he’s created a significant number of nonfiction works and a much greater amount of fiction.   He’s written scripts, or books that have been adapted into scripts, for dozens of movies, TV movies, and TV miniseries.   His works are usually set in contemporary Texas or in the Old West.

His first novel was published in 1961.   Its title was taken from the last line of a poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats (and which is carved on Yeats’s tombstone): Horseman, Pass By.   The setting is a Texas cattle ranch and nearby small town in the mid 1950s.

A couple years after its publication, it was made into the movie Hud, which was shot on location in the Texas Panhandle.   The four main characters include the title character, a rancher, played by Paul Newman; his father, who owns the ranch, enacted by Melvyn Douglas; and their housekeeper, portrayed by Patricia Neal.   And Brandon deWilde played Hud’s teenage nephew, through whose eyes the story is told.

The year before last, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, as being a movie that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

It was nominated for seven Oscars and won three.   The legendary James Wong Howe—known as one of the most innovative cinematographers in history, one of the first to use deep-focus cinematography, and considered to be a master of the use of shadow—was nominated for 10 Oscars in his career, and this is one of the two movies that he won the award for.   Patricia Neal won the best-actress Oscar.   The New York Times called her acting “brilliant” and described the portrayal by Melvyn Douglas as “magnificent”.   He won the Oscar for best supporting actor.

The performances by Paul Newman and Douglas in the confrontations between their characters—which provide the major expositive dynamic in the story—are stupendous.   Newman was nominated for 12 Oscars in his life, and he won three.   Nine of his Oscar nominations were for acting, including for his performance in this movie.   And while he won a best-actor Oscar for a different movie, his portrayal of Hud just might be his greatest role ever.   His performance is stunningly superb.   The New York Times called it “tremendous”, and Life Magazine described it as “faultless”.

THE READER IS INVITED TO TAKE NOTE OF THIS MESSAGE

SARCASTICALLY NOIR FILMS                                  Dreaming in Celluloid                                                        Independent Media and Production including:                                                                                         Acting,   Directing,   Sound/Video/Film Editing,                                                                                         Photography/Photoshop,                                                                                         Videography/Cinematography                                  https://www.youtube.com/user/SarcasticallyNoir

Hud was directed by Martin Ritt.   It was the first movie that Ritt and Newman’s recently founded company produced for Paramount Pictures.   Pauline Kael, one of the most famous and most influential American movie critics of the era, described it as an “anti-Western” and called it an “anti-American film”.   In a certain way, she was exactly correct.

With Newman in the role, Hud is a real hunk, and he is a terrifying, true boogeyman—the charming white Texan, the ultimate white American, what in that day, around the world, was referred to as “the ugly American”.   The character of Hud is what Saturday Review called a “raffish monster”.   He is charming and seductive like a psychopath.

Hud was conceived as the guy who was outwardly charming but who on the inside was obviously evil.   But some in the audiences—especially the young people—thought he was so likable, and even admired him.   Paul Newman and Martin Ritt were shocked at the reaction.   “We thought: last thing people would do was accept Hud as a heroic character,” Newman said, “His amorality just went over their head; all they saw was this Western, heroic individual.”

Perhaps it should’ve been no shock at all.   They had created the perfect archetype.

Hud is what today many white Americans (and many others too) look at in the mirror and see with horror—seeing on TV and on their own street corners in their own towns, and wondering what they have let themselves become (or have always been).   Ah, but so many of them say to themselves that that’s not they; they’re not like that; those are just bad guys, just bad apples.   (And of course many others see nothing wrong—as when Hud first came out—but now this day are defiantly resentful, because of so many who do recognize the horror.)

Hud may’ve been prescient.   It may’ve been ahead of its time in seeing forward to this day of reckoning of ours—to this moment at the crossroads we find ourselves lurching toward.

Hud epitomizes who and what has brought these great cataclysms crashing down on us: the reactions to a pestilence threatening us all, an economy that was already not capable of providing for us all (by incompetence or by neglect or by design?) and that is now in even greater collapse, a culture of rampant avarice and disregard for anyone else except as targets to be exploited, an environment being plundered and pillaged and brought to ruin.

And the whole context that Hud depicts is being in the middle of a plague and how one reacts to that.   Being set in Texas, the plague is among cattle (hoof-&-mouth disease).

And in the simple, cuttingly unadorned, straightforwardly great line of dialogue that comprises the denouement of the tale—and that of course tells us all what has brought us to this day of reckoning that we now have to confront, this crossroads that today we are at—Hud’s father, straight to his face, bluntly, forthrightly tells him just exactly what he unmistakably is:

an unprincipled man

home   cover   contents   archives   indices   masthead

Copyright 2020 The Cool Publication Company.