Original poster for Hud
Jesse Pasternack explains why Paul Newman’s scorching performance as Hud Bannon paved the way for complicated, immoral protagonists in American cinema.
In its own time, Hud (1963) received almost every mark of success that an American film could receive. After premiering at the Venice International Film Festival, it made $10 million against a budget of $2.4 million and got good reviews from many American critics. It even received seven Academy Award nominations, winning in three categories. But in our own time, Hud’s true legacy is underappreciated. That legacy is how Paul Newman’s performance in the titular role, to quote from acclaimed screenwriter/director Paul Schrader, “redefined the American cinema protagonist.”
Hud is about Hud Bannon (Newman), an intensely charismatic yet unethical young man. He lives and works on a ranch owned by his father, Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas), an aging cattle baron who despises him. Hud’s nephew Lonnie (Brandon deWilde) admires him, even though Homer blames Hud for the death of Lonnie’s father. When an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease threatens Homer’s beloved cattle, it brings the relationship between Hud and his father to the breaking point.
Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas in Hud
Even though it has been over 50 years since Hud came out, Newman’s performance still feels fresh and revelatory from the first second he is on screen. Director Martin Ritt introduces Hud walking out of a house where he has just had sex with someone else’s wife. Hud lambasts Lonnie and criticizes him for bothering him before he starts giving him orders, every one of which his nephew fulfills. Everything about Newman’s performance in this scene — his slow yet swaggery walk out of the house, the annoyed look on his face as he first talks to Lonnie, the general air of command he exudes — sets up Hud as being simultaneously cruel and compelling, magnetic and malevolent. Most crucially, he manages to do all of this without doing anything that would make Hud likable.
It is that last point which is the key to understanding why Hud is so important to redefining what a protagonist could do in American cinema. Before this movie, in large part because of the Hays Code, a protagonist’s morals had to be scrupulous. They couldn’t be shown to do anything immoral without repenting or learning something and, if they were shown to kill people without remorse, they would die themselves, like the gangster protagonists did in The Public Enemy (1931) or Scarface (1932).
When you compare Hud to those characters, it becomes easier to see why he was so groundbreaking. He helps a woman commit infidelity, gets into fights for stupid reasons, and has a troubled relationship with his dad which is far from the “father knows best” ethos of the decade which had preceded this one. He barely changes, never learns anything, and, unlike the gangster protagonists of the 1930s, finds himself alive and well in the end. It might be a stretch to call a character with such a dark personality a “breath of fresh air,” but he is definitely a strong and fascinating departure from what American cinema typically expected of its protagonists.
Newman as Hud
But what makes Hud the character so fascinating isn’t just the writing. What truly makes him work is Newman’s performance. While he never shies away from Hud’s amorality, Newman also makes him the most compelling character in the film. You can’t help but admire him as he goes about his misadventures, and not want him to get too hurt. In addition, although Newman doesn’t try to make Hud likable, he does provide flashes of vulnerability, like when Homer tells him what he really thinks of him. His ice-cold reaction to hearing that his father has never loved him because he doesn’t “give a damn” about other people (captured perfectly in a close-up created by Ritt and cinematographer James Wong Howe) is still one of the most chilling things I’ve seen in a movie, in part because, despite what Hud has done before, you feel for him in that moment.
Newman’s performance, while revelatory, lacked a crucial source of validation in its own time. Despite his co-stars Patricia Neal (brilliant as a housekeeper named Alma) and Douglas winning Academy Awards for their performances in this movie, Newman did not. But his work in this film would prove to be quietly influential. It’s hard to imagine some of the most celebrated performances in American cinema, like the one Robert De Niro gave in Raging Bull (1980), without this one paving the way for it. More recently, the wave of cruel yet charismatic male antiheroes in TV series like The Sopranos (1999-2007) or Breaking Bad (2008-2013) feels like it owes a debt to what Newman accomplished in this film. Perhaps that, more than the millions it made or the awards that it won, is the greatest success Hud ever achieved: expanding the idea of what a protagonist could do and, therefore, what type of stories you could tell in American cinema.
Hud will be screened at IU Cinema on January 27 as part of the 5X James Wong Howe series.