The other night I watched Hud for the first time. It’s not a movie I was avoiding, and I quite like Paul Newman, but it wasn’t on the top of my list either. I mainly watched it because I’ve been reading Pauline Kael’s “I Lost It At The Movies,” and while I have a good general idea of the films she’s talking about (I’m much better equipped to be familiar with the late 50s-early 60s era than, say, ten years ago), I was interested in watching the specific film that she’s talking about. Since her piece on British Free Cinema covered about seven or eight films at once (which I’ve located but haven’t sat down to yet), I decided Hud was probably the best bet.
Kael is divisive mostly because she will take other reviewers to task about their opinions on film. I’ve found that she cares less about the content of movies themselves and more about the way the public is receiving them. She worries about the state of cinema as she sees the movies in front of her lack completion or thematic resolution. Her writing focuses more on what people are taking away from movies than what the movies actually are. Sometimes she seems willfully wrong in her interpretations of films so that it’ll fit her worldview. She has a nostalgia for the past that is highly inaccurate. Despite all this, her writing is interesting because she has a cohesive worldview of the way movies should be. Whether or not you agree with her is one thing, and whether she’s ultimately a snob is another, but she very clearly wants a type of clarity from films that she often finds frustrating.
She ultimately seems to like Hud because of the split nature of the film. She sees it as though it’s at war with itself. While other critics treat it as condemnation of a selfish and cynical man who pushes everyone away, Kael understands that it’s these qualities that the audience actually relates to. Hud is the only “real” character, as the other characters simply stem from the public imagination of who good people are. The split creates a frission that makes the movie more useful and interesting than other Hollywood vehicles. In the split you can often see more of a truth than a wholly realized (and boring) film.
I think Kael still got it wrong though. The split is there but not because the audience cheers for the bastard character. It might have been different for audiences in 1963 – coming from a line of films like On the Waterfront and Rebel Without A Cause it’s easy to mistake empathy for encouragement. The film doesn’t condone Hud’s actions but it doesn’t celebrate them either. Instead it’s a bigger view of how Hud came to be, why he’s alone, and what happens to a person when they’ve never been treated with kindness.
The morality is the kind of baseless restrictions of the early 60s – one wrong move (read: one bad cow) and you’re ruined for life. Hud’s father sees himself as a good man but has never shown a shred of sympathy for his son. Young Don grows up and over his adolescent worship of Hud, which I guess is seen as a good and proper thing, yet doesn’t consider how Hud might feel about his good influence. It feels like a natural system for raising psychopaths and then condemning the new youth for not having any substance. Why are these kids so angry? We’ve given them everything.
Throughout the film people are always telling Hud that he’s wrong and it’s easy to assume this is the way it’s been for Hud his entire life. People telling him he’s a bad kid, his father giving up on him “long before” the terrible accident that killed his brother, and being surprised when he lashes out at everyone else. It seems a lot like he and his brother did all the same things but because Hud “never cared about anybody but himself” he got all the shit for it. I’m loathe to defend a character who attempts rape (and here Kael is EXCEEDINGLY wrong) but it’s clear that the movie doesn’t quite know what to do with Hud, so neither does the audience, and that’s kind of the tragedy of the film.
- If you haven’t seen it already, I wrote about my beloved Milo the goat for Nerdist.
- Glad Patricia Neal got an Oscar for this because she deserved it.