"Hud: Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood"

Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood:

As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those who attack American “materialism” was first aroused by the refugees from Nazi Germany who so often contrasted their “culture” with our “vulgar materialism” when I discovered that their “culture” consisted of their having had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. And as the cultural treasures they brought over with them were likely to be Meissen porcelain, Biedermeier furniture, oriental carpets, wax fruit, and bookcases with glass doors, it wasn’t too difficult to reconstruct their “culture” and discover that it was a stuffier middle-class materialism and sentimentality, than they could find in the new world. These suspicions were intensified by later experience: the most grasping Europeans were, almost inevitably, the ones who leveled the charge of American materialism. Just recently, at a film festival, a behind-the-iron-curtain movie director, who interrupted my interview with him to fawn over every Hollywood dignitary who came in sight, concluded the interview with, “You Americans won’t understand this, but I don’t make movies just for money.” Americans are so vulnerable, so confused and defensive about prosperity—those who live by making movies showing a luxurious way of life worry over the American “image” abroad. But, the economics of moviemaking being what they are, usually all the producers do about it is worry—which is probably just as well because films made out of social conscience have generally given an even more distorted view of America than those made out of business sense, and are much less amusing. The most conspicuous recent example is Hud—just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. 

Hud is a commercial Hollywood movie that is ostensibly an indictment of materialism, and it has been accepted as that by most of the critics. But those who made it protected their material interest in the film so well that they turned it into the opposite: a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself. The writers’ and director’s “anti-materialism” turns out to be a lot like the refugees’ anti-materialism: they had their Stefan Zweig side—young, tender Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde) and Melvyn Douglas’s Homer, a representative of the “good” as pious as Polonius; and they had their protection, their solid salable property of Meissen and Biedermeier, in Paul Newman. You can almost hear them say: “It’s a modern western, see, with this hell-raising man who doesn’t respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we’ll fool them, he doesn’t get the girl and he doesn’t change!” “But who’ll want to see that?” “Oh, that’s all fixed—we’ve got Paul Newman for the part.” They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience would not believe in their villainy, as with James Dean. 

Hud’s shouted last remark, his poor credo, “The world’s so full of crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or not,” has, at least, the ring of his truth. And it seems to me that perhaps the audience at large didn’t take all this very seriously, that we enjoyed it for its obvious hokum and factor of Western nostalgia, and for the wisecracking and slick style. Oddly, often more of American spirit and life came through thrillers and domestic comedies than through important, “serious” films like Marty or A Place in the Sun, which seemed like paralyzed, self-conscious imitations of European art, or films like Gentleman’s Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of the Hollywood “problem” picture. And when the commercial filmmakers had some leeway, as well as some talent, an extraordinary amount came through—the rhythm of American life that gives films like She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, You Can't Take It with You, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Sleep, Pat and Mike, The Manchurian Candidate and Charade a freshness and spirit that makes them unlike the films of any other country. These movies were no Lillian Hellman's melodramas with good and evil clay pigeons. Our movies are the best proof that Americans are liveliest and freest when we don’t take ourselves too seriously. 

Hud doesn’t really have a dramatic adversary; his adversaries were out of Lillian Hellman-land. The setting wasn’t too melodramatic, it was not the legendary West of myth-making movies like Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West. The comedy in Hud was in the incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr. Pepper, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture within the loneliness of vast spaces. My West wasn’t Texas; it was northern California, but our Sonoma County ranch was very much like this one—with the frame house, and the housekeeper’s cabin, and the hired hands’ bunkhouse, and my father and older brothers charging over dirt roads, not in Cadillacs but in Studebakers, and the Saturday nights in the dead little town with its movie house and ice cream parlor. This was the small-town West I and many friends came out of. In the back of my mind, Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater, while Homer was clearly an upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy—except for the brief sequence when Homer follows the bouncing ball and sings “Clementine” at the movies. I was even more bewildered when the reviews started coming out; what were the critics talking about? Unlike the laughing audience, they were taking Hud at serious message value as a work of integrity, and, even in some cases, as a tragedy. In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist panned the film. 

In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight said that “it is the kind of creative collaboration too long absent from our screen . . . by the end of the film, there can be no two thoughts about Hud: he’s purely and simply a bastard. And by the end of the film, for all his charm, he has succeeded in alienating everyone, including the audience.” According to Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “Hud is a rancher who is fully and foully diseased with all the germs of materialism that are infecting and sickening modern man . . . And the place where he lives is not just Texas. It is the whole country today. It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture that nurtures indulgence and greed. Hud is as profound a contemplation of the human condition as one of the plays of Eugene O’Neill”. The director carefully builds up the emotion that Crowther and probably audiences in general feel when the cattle, confused and trying to escape, are forced into the mass grave that has been dug by a bulldozer, and are there systematically shot down, covered with lime, and buried. This is the movie’s big scene, and it can be no accident that the scene derives some of its emotional power from the Nazis’ final solution of the Jewish problem; it’s inconceivable that these overtones would not have occurred to the group—predominantly Jewish—who made the film. Within the terms of the story, this emotion that is worked up is wrong, because it is manipulative. But I guess that they couldn’t resist the opportunity for a big emotional scene, a scene with impact. They got their big scene: it didn’t matter what it meant. So it’s pretty hard to figure out the critical congratulations for clarity and integrity, or such statements as Penelope Gilliatt’s in the Observer, “Hud is the most sober and powerful film from America for a long time. The scene when Melvyn Douglas’s diseased cattle have to be shot arrives like the descent of a Greek plague.” Whose error are the gods punishing? Was Homer, in buying Mexican cattle, merely taking a risk, or committing hubris? One of the things you learn on a ranch is that nobody is responsible for natural catastrophes; one of the things you learn in movies and other dramatic forms is the symbolic use of catastrophe. The locusts descended on Paul Muni in The Good Earth because he had gotten rich and bad: a farmer in the movies who neglects his wife and goes in for high living is sure to lose his crops. 

Hud plays it both ways: the texture of the film is wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful sequence is needed to jack up the action values, a disaster is used for all the symbolic overtones that can be hit—and without any significant story meaning. The English critics got even more out of it: Derek Prouse experienced a “catharsis” in The Sunday Times, “It is a drama of moral corruption—of the debilitating disease of avaricious self-seeking—that is creeping across the land and infecting the minds of young people in this complex, materialistic age. It is forged in the smoldering confrontation of an aging cattleman and his corrupted son.” John Dyer in Sight and Sound seemed to react to cues from his experience at other movies; his review worth a little examination. “From the ominous discovery of the first dead heifer, to the massacre of the diseased herd, to Homer’s own end and Hud’s empty inheritance of a land he passively stood by and watched die, the story methodically unwinds like a python lying sated in the sun.” 

Hud certainly couldn’t be held responsible for the cattle becoming infected—unless Dyer wants to go so far as to view that infection as a symbol of or a punishment for Hud’s sickness. Even Homer, who blamed Hud for just about everything else, didn’t accuse him of infecting the cattle. Dyer would perhaps go that far, because somehow “the aridity of the cattle-less landscape mirrors his own barren future.” Writing of the “terse and elemental polarity of the film,” Dyer says, “The earth is livelihood, freedom and death to Homer; an implacably hostile prison to Hud”. The scriptwriters give Homer principles; but they’re careful to show that Hud is rejected when he makes overtures to his father. Homer was generous and kind, and democratic in the Western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived. No doubt we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kauffmann says, “driven off by his Hud’s vicious physical assault.” 

But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because she was looking for new opportunities. Alma obviously wanted to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him. Despite his limitations, Paul Newman is good at playing blowhards who reveal the needs behind their transparent lies. The scriptwriters for Hud, who, I daresay, are as familiar as critics with theories of melodrama, know that heroes and villains mostly want the same things and that it is their way of trying to get them that separates one from the other. They impart this knowledge to Alma, who tells Hud that she desired him and he could have had her if he’d gone about it differently. Dyer expresses his personal view when he says it’s “on a level of sophistication totally unexpected from their scripts for two of Martin Ritt’s previous Faulkner-inspired films.” This has some special irony because not only is their technique in Hud a continuation of the episodic method they used in combining disparate Faulkner stories into The Long Hot Summer, but the dialogue quoted most appreciatively (Alma’s rebuff of Hud, “No thanks, I’ve had one cold-hearted bastard in my life, I don’t want another”) is lifted almost verbatim from that earlier script—when it was Joanne Woodward telling off Paul Newman. 

They didn’t get acclaim for their integrity and honesty that time because, although The Long Hot Summer was a box-office hit, the material was resolved as a jolly comedy, the actor and actress were paired off, and Newman as Ben Quick the barn burner turned out not really to be a barn burner after all. They hadn’t yet found the “courage” that keeps Hud what Time magazine called him, “an unregenerate heel, a cad to the end.” In neither film do the stories hold together, but Ritt, in the interim having made Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and failed to find an appropriate style—with the aid of James Wong Howe’s crisp cinematography—found something more European at last. Visually Hud is so unadorned, so skeletonic, that we may admire the bones without being quite sure of the name of the beast. This Westerner drama is part Rebel Without A Cause, part East of Eden, part Champion, with hints of the cynic anti-hero who is damaged and pretends not to care. Hud doesn't achieve a defined vision, except it's an anti-Western and somehow an anti-American film. 

In the New Yorker Brendan Gill writes, “It’s an attractive irony of the situation that, despite the integrity of its makers, Hud is bound to prove a box-office smash. I find this coincidence gratifying.” Believing in this kind of coincidence is like believing in Santa Claus. Hud is so astutely made and yet such a mess that it's only redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty. It is perhaps outwardly an archetypal Hollywood movie, but split in so many revealing ways that, like On the Waterfront or From Here to Eternity, it is the movie of its year (even though it’s shallow unlike those classics). The creators of Hud are probably the type of folks who want government's centralized power when it just works for their libertarian aims. They may hate cops but call them at the first hint of a prowler: they feel split and confused, and it shows in a million ways. I imagine they’re very like Hud. —{Film Quarterly, Summer 1964} by Pauline Kael