Martin Ritt (1963)
Excellent when it concentrates on the characters, unfortunately inclined to sermonise, but all in all one of the best, most richly enjoyable American films of the early 1960s. It’s very interesting to see now – as an early example of two, connected kinds of later film. Hud decries the materialism and moral bankruptcy of mid-twentieth century America. This isn’t one of its strengths but, in this respect, Martin Ritt’s movie is a pioneer: once Vietnam, the Kennedy and King assassinations and the permissive society had taken hold of the American psyche later in the decade, these themes became familiar (and often tiresome). The film is also one of the first ‘modern Westerns’: the people live and work in places and jobs familiar from classics Westerns – but there’s a prevailing sense that the best days of the culture are behind it. Hud is based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, who also wrote the source material for The Last Picture Show and, more than 30 years later, co-wrote the screen adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (the seminal first scenes of which, set in 1963, are contemporary with Hud).
The piece is essentially a four-hander. There’s Homer, the elderly, honourable cattle farmer; Hud, his charming, don’t-give-a-damn son; Lon, the orphaned son of Hud’s brother, who died in a car crash when Hud was drunk driving; and Alma, their fortyish housekeeper. All three generations of the men work on Homer’s farm – the central narrative thread is the discovery of foot-and-mouth and the eventual destruction of Homer’s herd. The domestic details and description of small town Texas life are fascinating. Alma’s kitchen, the café, the picture house, the pig-wrestling sequence – these capture the mixture of community, tradition and boredom at the heart of the characters’ lives. Hud is much less satisfying when the characters, particularly Homer, speechify – telling each other what’s wrong with their approaches to life and with the country. The writing in these bits is flaccid and obvious – in contrast to the terse, funny vernacular that gives the wary courtship of Alma and Hud a marvellous tension. The stiff verbal explanations seem redundant anyway, given the visual power of Hud. James Wong Howe’s framing of the wide, empty landscapes, the ranch, and the placing and lighting of the characters in these settings completely convey the spirit of the place and a sense of people left stranded by the passage of time.
Melvyn Douglas, as Homer, is physically very impressive – the distinguished, weatherbeaten face and the obstinately upright carriage get across the old man’s intransigent, self-righteous nobility, his narrow-minded high-mindedness. (As Sally said, No Country For Old Men would be a good name for this film too; it’s a notable coincidence that the McMurtry novel is called Horseman, Pass By – also a phrase from a Yeats poem.) Douglas gives a fine performance as an unyielding windbag – even though Martin Ritt, the husband-and-wife writing team of Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch and the actor himself seem to share Homer’s idea of himself as admirably principled. As a result, Homer quickly becomes tedious – except for the moment when he sings along – full-bloodedly and with an assertiveness in which you sense his fear for the future – with ‘My Darlin’ Clementine’, when he goes to the cinema with Lon. Brandon deWilde may have been cast in the latter role partly because of the resonance of his having played the child in Shane a decade or so earlier; anyway, there’s a sadness about his presence here, because of that association, because the actor was dead in 1972 at the age of 30 – and, though it seems unkind to say so, because of the gulf between deWilde’s interpretative skills and those of the other three principals. Even so, Lon’s earnestness – although it may be the actor’s rather than the character’s – is affecting; Lon/deWilde somehow doesn’t fit easily into the scheme of things and this creates a sense that Homer, Hud and Alma all feel, in their various ways, bad about not doing enough to help him.
The film’s most famous scene is the one in which the herd are slaughtered; it is impressive but, because it’s straining for symbolic power, the effect is rather to link the sequence with the less good parts of the dialogue. What’s unarguably and enduringly brilliant in Hud are the performances of Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. Newman had an unsurpassed ability to play glamorous blowhards and show you the vulnerability beneath the bravado in an unforced way, in a way that lets you both enjoy the strutting charm and feel the underlying desperation. An exasperated shrug as he walks away from one of his father’s tirades is not only beautifully expressive – it also deflates Homer’s (and the script’s) rhetoric and humanises the scene. In the same way, Newman transforms the cliché of Hud’s irresponsibility resulting in the death of his brother by showing – and making you believe – how it’s still eating at Hud. This gives his cockiness a suppressive edge; and his feelings towards his nephew, for all Hud’s easy banter, are uneasy and unresolved.
Newman’s likeability, in combination with Martin Ritt’s natural sympathy and skill with actors, saves the film from the pompous condemnation of Hud that the script’s set-up threatens. Yet Hud’s physical approaches to Alma are still uncomfortable; and, when he tries to rape her, it’s actually more troubling because it’s Paul Newman. The ambiguities in this sequence are compelling – not least because Patricia Neal doesn’t allow you to forget, even when threatened with sexual violence by him, of how strongly Alma is attracted to Hud. Neal’s acting is an extraordinary example of letting the audience see a character’s feelings even though these are hidden to the other characters. Hud goes out for the evening, Homer talks with Lon about the ways of women, Alma silently does the dishes – and holds the screen. When Hud come on strong to her, and she flirts with him, Alma – used, sexy and witty all at the same time – is clearly insisting that her head rule her heart: Neal creates a wonderful, dizzy rhythm as Alma keeps spinning towards Hud then reels herself back. The performance is unshowy and doesn’t occupy much screen time; it’s remarkable that, in one of the Academy’s finer hours, she won the Best Actress Oscar. The film also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Douglas) and Best Cinematography (black-and-white – but definitely not monochrome). The rapidly melancholy and sparingly used music is by Elmer Bernstein.
31 October 2008
