Hud

Dir: Martin Ritt

1962

*****

Hud is revolutionary addition in the history of the western. I’ve always seen Bad Day At Black Rock as being the first significant neo-western but Hud was the first revisionist Western, a twist in the genre that many other westerns took a while to catch up with. The antihero wasn’t a new concept within the western genre but there hadn’t quite been a character like Hud before, at least none as complex or contemporary. Based on Larry McMurtry's 1961 novel, Horseman, Pass By, the film's title character, Hud Bannon, was a minor character in the original screenplay that was reworked as the lead role by scriptwriters by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. Director Martin Ritt and Paul Newman co-founded Salem Productions and the company made a three-film deal with Paramount Studios and for its first film Salem hired husband-and-wife scriptwriters Ravetch and Frank, Jr., who worked with Ritt and Newman on The Long, Hot Summer. Ravetch found McMurtry's novel in an airport shop during a Dallas stopover and presented the project to Ritt and Newman after reading a description of Hud Bannon. Hud (played by Paul Newman in one of the greatest performances of his career) is ambitious and self-centered, the opposite of his deeply principled rancher father Homer (played by the wonderful Melvyn Douglas). Also living on the Bannon ranch is Hud's teenage nephew, Lonnie (child star Brandon deWilde in his second classic western following Shane), who looks up to both men but is most impressed by Hud. Lonnie and Hud are attracted to the Bannons' housekeeper, Alma (Oscar-winning Patricia Neal). Although she is attracted to Hud, Alma keeps her distance because she has been mistreated in the past by men like him. Hud was a smaller character in the novel and was Homer’s step-son, while Alma was a black housekeeper to Homer’s wife. The removal of Homer’s wife took away influence from Lonnie so he could just be concerned with the two older male figures and the writers thought 1963 was still too early for an interracial sex scene, even though it was actually sexual assault. I don’t quite agree with this but Patricia Neal was phenomenal in her performance. The film has all the right ingredients of a classic. The performances are second to none, all the right elements from the novel had been tweaked for the visual adaptation and James Wong Howe’s cinematography is second to none. Howe's use of contrast to create space and his selection of black-and-white has long been favoured by critics and fans and it won him the Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography that year. Paul Newman went full method, Patricia Neal, who at the time had a stormy marriage to children’s author Roald Dahl and had just suffered the recent loss of her seven-year-old daughter to measles encephalitis, opened up to the actor during a rare break that allowed the cast to hang out by their hotel’s poolside. Neal found herself opening up emotionally about her daughter Olivia, who had died suddenly just months before filming. After her long outpouring, Newman stared at her for a long moment, then simply uttered "tough" and walked away. She was taken aback by his reaction. It was early in production, and they had not yet done a major scene together, so she hadn't really gotten to know him well or to understand his methods. Later on in the shoot, however, she realized he was already very much in character as Hud. Ritt, Newman and Douglas were staunch liberals, so the film didn’t go down too well with many. It was described by a few as an ‘anti-Western’, fundamentally ‘anti-American’, and so astutely made that it was redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty. Utter nonsense. The character of Hud is many things and represented an aspect of modern society for sure, he is mean, unscrupulous and never has even a momentary twinge of conscience or change of heart but, as Paul Newman put it, "We thought the last thing people would do was accept Hud as a heroic character ... His amorality just went over the audience's head; all they saw was this western, heroic individual". Martin Ritt later attributed audience interpretation of the character to the counterculture of the 1960s which "changed the values" of the young audiences who saw Hud as a hero. In retrospect there was no other film like it, maybe he was seen as a contrived character but the truth was that he was quite the opposite, I think this is why the film still resonates with audiences and it is still the alternative western of choice for most fans of the genre.