The Cowboy Angel Rides-Paul Newman’s “Hud” ( 1963) –A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Hud, starring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon DeWilde,

In a recent review of another Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke, I mentioned that Mister Newman represented in the post-World War II period an emerging different the hard-boiled take no prisoners macho for the sake of macho earlier class of male lead actors like Bogie and Robert Mitchum. The post-war variety was a little vulnerable, a little less virtuous and showing a lot more signs of alienation that their older brothers. Paul New fit that space to a tee bringing his alienated vulnerable, what the hell side out in the film under review Hud (the short name says it all as an emblem of the times).       

Here we have one of the early examples of the way guys raised on a steady diet of Old West legends, everything black versus white in the morality scheme of things surrendering to the ambiguity of the post-war ethos down among the modern cowboys. In a sense this film is a coming of age film since although the action centers of Hud’s wild man gone mad exploits and decisions (or lack of decisions may be better and just drifting along) the other basic story line about his young nephew Lon, played by Brandon DeWilde, coming of age in an age when the Old West was surrendering by the minute to the New West (a New West that will be examined fully in the film The Last Picture Show about a decade later.   

This is how this one pony’s up though. Hud, as already mentioned is a hard-working, hard-loving, hard-drinking,well, everything hard son of the Texas range. A range created by his father, old Homer played by Melvyn Douglas, with whom he is fatally alienated. Old Homer from the Old West rugged individualism school of life can’t abide the fact that Hud just doesn’t give a damn, is out for the main chance-for Hud.  Throw in that by his dereliction he killed Lon’s father and you have a classic love-hate relationship. Homer having given up on Hud has staked everything on bringing Lon up right-and in the end he does wind up being a decent young man.      

But along the way there is nothing but trouble for Lon-first about whether he wants to emulate Uncle Hud and second trying to live up to his grandfather’s expectations. Complicating in this male-household is the housekeeper Alma, played by Patricia Neal whom Hud has a lustful eye on and Lon has affection for as well. Even more worrisome though is the fact that the livestock, the cattle that give life to the ranch have contracted hoof and mouth disease and in the end must be destroyed as a public health issue. (The scene where unknowing cattle are slaughtered and bulldozed to a mass grave is quite hard to take.). In the end old Homer is broken by that loss, by the loss of his livelihood. In the end Hud, after a bad attempted rape scene with Alma, has learned nothing by the old man’s death. In the end Lon walks away from what feelings he had for Hud as a model. Yeah, Hud was a man born after his time, after the Old West had been burned out of the countryside and the new cowboy West had left him disarmed against his own hubris.