Reviews2.Main Content
Hud
Hud
Tue, 13 Apr 2010
Bad boys. Actors love playing them, audiences love watching them. But when does an antagonist become an anti-hero, a character whom we can’t help but be drawn to even though we know we should disapprove? Inspired by the Paul Newman season running at London’s BFI Southbank this April, Trevor Johnston takes a look at a 1963 drama which introduced a great movie anti-hero and gave Newman one of his signature roles – Martin Ritt’s modern western ‘Hud’. Spoilers ahead as our man in the cowboy hat looks at the shaping of a central character the film’s iconic poster campaign dubbed ‘The man with the barbed wire soul!’.
Think different. That’s what marks the great celluloid anti-heroes. Whether it’s Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, D-Fens from Falling Down, Ethan Edwards from The Searchers or even (before we get too male-dominated!) the eponymous duo from Thelma & Louise, these are individuals who articulate ideas which defy convention. They act on feelings which we recognise, but which we may not be in a position to pursue for ourselves. They’re rebels on our behalf, even if their flawed psyches and instinctive anger means that their function is more to ask questions of their society than resolve its problems into a new order.
HudHud Bannon (Paul Newman) is certainly one of their number. In the rural Texas of the early ’60s, he’s the restless son of elderly widower Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas), a proud rancher who built up his sizeable cattle holding through years of sheer hard work. Hud’s a womaniser and hell-raiser, of which the old man takes a dim view, but his teenage nephew Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde), who also lives on the farm, evidently looks up to him. Both Lonnie’s parents are dead, and his grandpa has been trying to see that the boy is brought up right, though for a mother figure he has to rely on Alma (Patricia Neal), the live-in cook and maid, who has her own quarters just across the yard from the main house. Stories about anti-heroes are stories about values, and what’s set out here is a battle between the past (Homer’s traditional belief in work and reward) and the present (Hud’s ethos of instant gratification) to win the soul of the future (the values Lonnie will take with him into manhood). All the story needs is some catalytic incident to jolt the conflict into action, and that arrives with the vet’s nightmare diagnosis that Homer’s prized herd have foot-and-mouth…
For Homer, it’s a crushing blow. His cows will have to be destroyed, and for him the insurance money is no compensation for the loss of the animals who symbolise his life’s work. Hud’s response is a key indicator of the moral divergence between these two central characters – he reckons they should sell the lot of them before they’re put under quarantine, act like they’ve no idea the cattle are infected, and let some other poor sap deal with the problem further down the line. Homer’s appalled by such a self-serving solution, which blithely ignores the possibility that moving the contaminated cows could risk starting a national epidemic. What sort of a man would even suggest such a thing?
Larry McMurtry's Brokeback MountainThat’s the essence of the conflict in Martin Ritt’s film, adapted by highly esteemed screenwriting husband-and-wife Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr from ‘Horseman, Pass By’, the début novel by Larry McMurtry, who went on to become the country’s leading literary chronicler of the American West and its contemporary legacy. Since the image of the West and its core values of honesty and toil are so much a part of America’s national self-image, stories which look at modern society in the light of Western mythology can thus sometimes offer particularly piercing insights. Hud is a prime instance, and others include Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952) and Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner (1972) – examining the rodeo as an arena for the testing of manhood and the expression of self-destructive machismo. Taking things right up to date is Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, examining the myths of masculinity with a love story which blurs the boundaries between hetero and homo, and also bringing us full-circle with Hud, since it was adapted for the screen by none other than Larry McMurtry.
Okay, celluloid history lesson over. What’s especially enlightening when comparing the source novel and the screenplay, is that while the former is a first-person account taken from the perspective of largely passive observer Lonnie as he deals with adolescent alienation and tries to define what sort of person he wants to be, the film in turn is conceived in such a way as to put Paul Newman’s title characterisation centre stage. In the book, Hud is just one of the key participants against which Lonnie measures himself, and the roustabout farmhand remains absent for significant periods of time when he’s not in Lonnie’s company. Indeed, equally important is another farmhand, Jesse, a rather more reserved wanderer who’s come to the realisation that by choosing not to settle down he’s ended up with nothing. Ravetch and Frank Jr simply omitted him from their adaptation, while also turning the black maid Halmea into a white woman named Alma, thus toning down McMurtry’s heady sense of interracial sexual longing, which it realistically would not have been possible to bring to the screen in a major Hollywood production of 1963. Their changes, resulting in an adaptation containing much original writing, also reflect a certain industry nous that the role of Hud would be perfect for Paul Newman. It remains a truism today that a screenplay with a juicy part a powerful actor would want to play might accordingly be that one step closer to getting made.
Ultimate man - Paul Newman in Hud
So, let’s look in detail at how the script for Hud creates a classic celluloid anti-hero:
The build-up
We hear about Hud before we see him, since Lonnie’s task is to head from the remote ranch into town early one morning and collect Hud from whatever mischief he’s been up to. Thus, we learn that he drives a flashy pink Cadillac and that he trashed a bar in town the night before. Lonnie then has to retrieve him from the bed of a married woman whose husband arrives home at exactly the wrong moment. Hud’s a scoundrel, but the fact is made dramatically effective by having his reputation precede him.
Wit and wisdom
Someone like Hud, essentially a selfish bastard, has his unpalatable aspects, so the writing has to amplify his charmingly roguish elements to win over the audience. The charisma of a star actor undoubtedly factors in here, but Ravetch and Frank Jr make sure he’s never short for an answer, and give him a number of crowd-pleasingly cheeky bits of business – like pretending it’s Lonnie who’s been visiting the unfaithful wife in the opening sequence, and playing up his role as protector of the errant adolescent when the cuckolded husband threatens violence. Hud’s suggestive banter with the housemaid Alma (who gives as good as she gets, it has to be said) also masks Hud’s sexual predatoriness behind a façade of salty humour. If the writer can get the audience wondering what this rapscallion’s going to say or do next, then that’s a major part of the battle won in terms of cajoling them into engaging with the themes of the story.
What’s he against?
Of course, the all-time classic anti-hero line is from The Wild One, where leather-clad biker Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against, and his reply is ‘Whaddaya got?’. There’s something of the same spirit here in Hud Bannon, no respecter of social niceties, who drinks, screws and brawls to excess. He’s scornful of government intervention in overseeing the destruction of the infected cows on the ranch – and even the law which forbids farmers from shooting buzzards. Right from the opening scene, the writers flag up the tensions between Hud and his elderly father, who gets Lonnie to summon him from his night on the town – it’s the old man who ultimately calls the shots. This is a central conflict in the story, culminating in Hud threatening legal action to get his share of the ranch while Homer’s still alive, and this (together with the loss of the cattle) is one of the factors which destroys Homer’s health and hastens his demise. Youth and individuality are lined up against old age and authority as the script keeps jabbing away at this core conflict, putting the viewer on the spot – are we attracted to Hud’s rebellious energy or Homer’s venerable solidity? The fact that it’s not so cut-and-dried for much of the action is what keeps us involved.
What’s he for?
An aspect which the screenwriters brought to the adaptation, and which is less developed in the novel, is to give a sense that Hud isn’t just a lout, he has a thought-through position on life. It’s the polar opposite to Homer, but Hud’s belief is that the corruption of modern life demands that you look after number one or risk being torn apart where it’s every man for himself. ‘The world’s so full of crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or not’ sums up his philosophy in the famous closing lines. For Hud, men are venal by nature, so what’s the point in toeing the line, after all, he says….’ If you take the sinners away from the saints, you’ll be lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln’. Many viewers will feel that this represents their own perspective more accurately than the values of honesty, hard work and reward embodied by Homer and his ranch, so again it’s giving the audience (and indeed, master Lonnie who’s also taking all this in) plenty to mull over as the antagonism between Hud and Homer intensifies in the course of the drama.
Putting our repressed desires into action
In the novel, Lonnie’s first person narration makes his adolescent sexual longing very clear, leading to a very troubling scene where a drunken Hud, after a bust-up with Homer, heads for the cook Halmea’s room and rapes her – Lonnie knows what’s happening, but after making a cursory attempt to stop the attack can’t help himself but watch this violent sexual encounter. On screen, given the censorship restrictions of the day, the assault doesn’t get that far, yet in both the film and the book, Hud responds to Lonnie’s accusing look by claiming that he wasn’t doing anything the teenager hadn’t wanted to do himself. It’s a telling reminder that our sexuality may not always be in sync with our morality, though, to be fair, while Hud’s words do sting Lonnie, he in turn makes it clear that he would never have wanted the cook ‘in that way’.
Crossing the line
The rape scene is a defining moment in ‘Hud’ since it shows us the dark side of the character’s selfish instincts, the moment where the viewer has to reconsider whether we’re on his side after all. Anyone who’s going to tackle an anti-hero story needs to understand that this is the whole raison d’etre for such narratives, to provide that pause for thought where the audience has to rethink where their own boundaries lie. Hence, while we might share some of Travis Bickle’s distaste for the sleazy characters peopling the streets of New York, we think again when he turns into a Mohican-cropped, pistol-toting avenger. Hud’s sexual assault serves to have us reflecting on Homer’s assessment of his errant son – ‘You don’t care about people. You don’t value nothin’, you don’t respect nothin’, you keep no check on your appetites at all. You live just for yourself and that makes you not fit to live with’. In the light on the attack which causes Halmea/Alma to leave the ranch, do we begin to have more sympathy for Homer’s assessment?
A wider view is crucial
The wider view - HudGoing beyond the personal to insinuate that a drama has things to say about society as a whole is always tricky to negotiate. Make it too obvious and you’ve got the sort of speechifying which causes the viewer to switch off, make it so subtle that nobody notices – well, what’s the point? A writer approaching an anti-hero story must surely by the very nature of the material be interested in questions of freedom and morality, and that’s certainly something which Ravetch and Frank Jr’s screenplay adaptation brings to the fore. In the aforementioned confrontation where Homer delivers the ‘respect’ speech, Lonnie comes to Hud’s defence, saying that ‘everyone else round here is like that’. Homer however, remains firm: ‘The nature of the country changes because of the people we admire’. One might argue that this sounds like the film-makers choosing their moment to state the story’s premise, but it is still the sort of thing that the steady, honest, somewhat pompous old man would say. For a screenwriter, such portentous lines of dialogue are always a test, but if you have aspirations to make wider social statements it’s a challenge that has to be faced.
Reaction and reward
As the film builds to Alma’s departure and Homer’s demise, we’re then left with intrigue on two fronts – what now for Hud and Lonnie? The fact that these are the only two remaining major characters adeptly turns the attention back to the central thrust of the story: whose values will Lonnie (and by extension the youth of ’60s America) adopt? The answer is satisfyingly complex, since Lonnie’s total scepticism that Homer will achieve any spiritual redemption in death, shows him to some extent investing in Hud’s rejection of conventional social mores. However, Lonnie also opts to set out into the world to find work and become a man, so he’s largely ascribing to the pioneer spirit embodied by grandfather Homer. Which leaves Hud with…an empty ranch, and a suggestion that the final reward for his selfishness is complete isolation. So, the writing has not only set up and intensified the story’s conflict between self-serving freedom and societal authority, it’s also traced a through-line to a resolution which eschews simplistic black-and-white judgments – especially when Paul Newman delivers a dismissive final gesture indicating that he’s far from bothered that they’ve all gone and left him alone.
While a modern adaptation of the novel would surely prove that bit more raw and probably not fight shy of the original’s racial angle, the fact that there’s still much to enjoy and learn from Hud getting on for five decades from the film’s initial release, is an indicator of the still-relevant conflicts at the heart of the story, and the skilled way in which the script and performances make the most from them. Hud Bannon may not be the baddest of cinematic bad boys in modern terms, but the very readability of the film’s story elements make him a suitable study for any aspiring screenwriter approaching the construction of a compelling anti-hero.
Hints and Tips
• Anti-heroic characters can effectively draw the audience into a story, but to do so the writing needs to pay attention to their aspects which attract the audience and the aspects which might in the end repel us. Getting the balance right and establishing a sort of push-pull is significant here.
• Rebellion is about context: if we’re drawn to an anti-hero who bridles at the restrictions society imposes on us, then it stands to reason that the story must also make those restrictions clear, ensuring that circumstances or an opposing character are on hand to enshrine the values of convention. Hud also filters the story through a youthful observer who’s trying to work out what he thinks about life, so a compelling anti-hero can often prove a valuable foil in a coming-of-age story.
• Transgression is key: it’s possible to create a compelling pivotal moment in a story by having the anti-hero, whose rebellious cool has drawn us in thus far, perpetrate an action which we realise is beyond the pale. Anti-hero stories can offer powerfully involving moments which put the audience on the spot, forcing us to define our own moral boundaries in relation to events on screen.
• Enriching the viewing experience depends on giving the story somewhere to go – it’s the knock-on effect from the pivotal moment of moral confrontation and reflection which will eventually deliver what the story wants to say. If the writer is also able to suggest that the behaviour of the anti-hero character has wider ramifications for society at large (something which is to a certain degree built into such stories about moral boundaries), then that also deepens the viewer’s response to the material.
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2010
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.
Hud is available on DVD and copies of Larry McMurtry’s ‘Horseman, Pass By’ can also be picked up on Amazon.
The Paul Newman season continues at BFI Southbank until the end of April.
And if you are inspired by the transition of the McMurtry novel from page to screen as described above, don't forget that we will be taking a closer look at adaptation with our Truth & Fiction seminar this summer.