To first order, Hud is about a cattle ranch dealing with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. And if this were like our last foray into Texas cattle country, 1956’s Giant, that’s all it would be. But Hud’s actually about the complicated relationship between Hud Bannon (Paul Newman), his father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), and his nephew Lonnie (Brandon deWilde). That means that, despite the environs, Hud has more in common with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof than Giant.
Paul Newman is electrifying as Hud, the man who “can talk a man into trusting [him], a woman into wanting [him].” Lon wants to grow up to be like Hud but Homer fears that prospect since, at heart, Hud is drunk, arrogant, and worthless. Homer eviscerates Hud’s character thusly:
You don’t care about people. You don’t give a damn about ‘em. You got all that charm and it makes the youngsters want to be like you. That’s the shame of it ‘cause you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites. You live just for yourself and that makes you not fit to live with.
Homer’s right. Hud wants to pawn off their sickly cattle on their neighbors but Homer has the stock shot instead. Hud has a flirty relationship with housekeeper Alma (Patricia Neal), but after he tries to rape her1 she leaves the ranch. And there’s no third-act redemption for Hud. After Homer dies, Lon finally sees Hud for who he is and takes off, leaving Hud all alone at the ranch, crackin’ a beer as the film fades out.
Rating: 8/10. Advice: you gotta care about people. You gotta give a damn about ‘em.
Cast and Crew
Paul Newman is here for the third time, once again playing a drunken avatar of tortured masculinity. But unlike Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Fast Eddie in The Hustler, Hud doesn’t learn anything and ends up alone. Thing is, Hud was cool—that was kind of the point—and a lot of misguided boys in the ‘60s idolized him.
We’re hitting highlight after highlight for Paul Newman, but one movie we missed was Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). We mentioned that one briefly in our 1962 wrap-up, since it scored Geraldine Page a nomination for Best Actress. It’s a film version of a Tennessee Williams play where a good-looking gigolo (Newman, of course) becomes the lover of a washed-up film star (Page) to further his Hollywood dreams.2
Patricia Neal is mesmerizing in the role of Alma and won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Neal’s name comes up a bit on Jeopardy, mostly in reference to Hud or to her famous husband, Roald Dahl. Two other noteworthy movie roles for her were opposite Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead (1949) and saying the words Klaatu Barada Nikto in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Hud was based on author Larry McMurtry’s first novel, 1961’s “Horseman, Pass By.”3 At the used bookstore I frequent, McMurtry’s works take up four whole shelves, so I’m guessin’ he’s a guy you might wanna know.
McMurtry wrote about the contemporary West, especially his home state of Texas. His most popular novel was “Lonesome Dove,” which won the 1986 Pulitzer for fiction. Set in the 1870s, it’s about two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, driving cattle from Texas to Montana. It was made into a popular 1989 TV miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. The novel got a sequel, “Streets of Laredo,” as well as two prequels, “Dead Man’s Walk” and “Comanche Moon.”
There’s two other works of his that you should know, both of which had major film adaptations.
“The Last Picture Show”: a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel about a friend group in the fictional dying Texas town of Thalia in the early 1950s. The film version from 1971 was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starred Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd; it scored eight Oscar nominations.
“Terms of Endearment”: about the relationship between a mother, Aurora Greenway, and her free-spirited daughter Emma. In the 1983 film from James L. Brooks, the pair were played by Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger (with Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, and Danny DeVito in supporting roles). This was an even bigger Oscar darling, getting 11 noms and winning Best Picture.
Both of the above books had sequels (“Texasville” and “The Evening Star,” respectively). The sequels were both turned into films that brought back the ame leads; both were critical and commercial failures. We’ll see McMurtry’s work in this column again since he helped adapt an Annie Proulx short story into the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005).
The Trivia
Hud goes to a pig scramble hosted by the Kiwanis, so today we’re talking about service and fraternal organizations.
The Kiwanis were founded in Detroit in 1915 with the goal of community improvement through service. They do service projects and raise money, typically to support children’s causes. They’re known for Key Club, which is for high school students.
The Rotary Club is easy to mix up with Kiwanis. They’re both service organizations, but Rotary’s older (founded in Chicago in 1905 by Paul Harris) and has more of a focus on international service. One of their big initiatives is eradicating polio. Its motto is “service above self” and its name came from how meetings originally rotated from office to office.
But don’t mix Rotary and Kiwanis up with our last service organization, Lions Club. This one was established in 1917 and its primary focus is vision and hearing care.
From service organizations, let’s move to fraternal organizations. First up: the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE). You should know that it was established as a social club in New York in 1868 and that the chapters of Elks are broken into “lodges.” Besides the Elks, there’s another ungulate social organization to know: the Loyal Order of Moose.4
The Shriners5 are a fraternal group that was spun off from the Masons in 1872. Beyond their red fezzes and tiny cars, they also run a bunch of children’s hospitals. You can see their wacky Middle East-themed logo below.
Knights of Columbus: this one, founded in 1882, is specifically a Catholic fraternal organization. It’s named after Christopher Columbus—though, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a push to rename the organization “Knights of Indigenous Peoples.”
But, uh, the most famous fraternal organization is probably the Freemasons. If you want to learn about the Freemasons, you can either:
Watch this video, which describes how boring the Freemasons are.
Read the comments section of that same video, which describes how, over the last 300 years, Freemasons have manipulated global politics from their temples to fulfill an ancient prophecy of cosmic dominance.
Odds and Ends
Hud drives a pink cadillac, but I don’t think he got it from good sales of Mary Kay products…Lon pages through a paperback of “From Here to Eternity”; we covered the film adaptation last year…Alma tells Lon that “boys with impure thoughts get acne,” which shows her confusing correlation and causation…Alma says she only drinks Tokaji wine, a Hungarian sweet wine whose grapes are affected by noble rot…Martin Ritt directed Hud, and it was one of his six films that starred Newman6…a devastating line from Homer: “it don’t take long to kill things—not like it does to grow.”
Our second movie in as many weeks with a rape scene. Here’s to hoping Sidney Poitier doesn’t rape any nuns next week in Lilies of the Field.
As often happens with Tennessee Williams film adaptations, the film is bowdlerized. In the play, Newman’s character is castrated (long story), but in the film he’s just beaten up.
Which gets its name from a quote from the final line of W. B. Yeats’ poem “Under Ben Bulben”: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” Yeats wrote the poem at the end of his life and this quote serves as the epitaph on his tombstone.
And speaking of ungulates: in “The Flintstones,” their fictional fraternal club is the Water Buffalo Lodge.
Originally, the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (AAONMS). Partially in response to 9/11, they scrapped that and went with the simplified “Shriners International.”
The other five: The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), The Outrage (1964), and Hombre (1967). We’ll see Ritt’s work again in this column.