Hud took home the 1963 Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematographer, thanks to the excellent work of James Wong Howe. I’m inclined to award it another prize for Best Thematically Relevant Choice of Black and White.
I originally wrote, “This is a movie that would lose something in color,” but then I realized that what I actually mean is, “This is a movie that would gain the wrong things in color.”
Hud, which covers the last days of a Texas ranch, is the story of a localized apocalypse: how an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease brings an end to an entire herd1 and one man’s life’s work, and how even the illusion of the family’s cohesion collapses along with it. Even when this world was alive, it was harsh and spare—wide, flat expanses of land barely interrupted by trees, with the occasional mountains mostly flat-topped too, with the horizon line often low in the frame like the sky will swallow the characters up, with the glare, with the dry heat, with the small margins of error—and then we watch it die. Color would relieve that starkness too much.
Color is extraneous, and this is a world with no flesh on its bones. It can’t long support Patricia Neal’s Alma, the housekeeper whose warmth and good humor feels like the Bannon family’s only real source of oxygen, and she has to specifically be from outside of it. The color would be inherent, and it wouldn’t work at all. This sky isn’t blue, it’s empty.
You can enjoy things, in Hud, but only by fucking and drinking and trying to grab greased pigs: games should be risky and stupid, and their pleasures should be fleeting. Anything more beautiful and sustaining, like love, is bound to splinter. By the time the film opens, Paul Newman’s venal, callow Hud has already ruined his relationship with his father (and been ruined by it in return); over the next 112 minutes, he also drives away Alma and his once-adoring nephew (Brandon deWilde). He’ll have to drink more, fuck around more, chase more pigs. In time, the drinking will likely win out more and more. He’s lost the only people he might have loved enough to stop for.
Part of the bleak brilliance of Hud is that I feel for Hud, but only so far, and again, that comes back to the black and white. I watched this with my friend Scott, and I joked early on that being able to see Paul Newman’s eyes in all their iconic blue glory would make his asshole character too powerful, and you know what, I was right. Even a black-and-white Paul Newman is still Paul Newman, of course, but Hud is pitiable and loathsome and magnetic, not a charmer or a heartthrob. He literally can’t be a “colorful” character, so the ways he hurts people, and the hurt he sometimes shows he feels himself, don’t become eccentricities. Again, rural mid-century Texas is a harsh world. People here are what they do, not how or why they do it, and so, at the end of the day, Hud is a destructive force.
He’ll become an oil baron, sooner or later. He’ll help shape the country. Even in 1963, it was clear what that would lead to—and in the intervening years, out in the real world, we started shooting this kind of man in color.
Hud is streaming on Kanopy.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
The glasses-break heard 'round the world.
Where to start with the dark comedy that's my favorite contemporary anthology show.
Streaming Shuffle
Not the movie you would expect from this header image.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Five, “Sounding”
“How long’s that gonna last?”
“Less than you fear but more than you hope, most likely.”
“What does that mean?”
“In fact, runnin’s a mistake – that’s how they find you.”
This whole episode is driven by Ava – running away because she can’t take the pressure anymore. This is very funny after my initially thinking she was going to become some kind of crime lady; I don’t know if I’d call it a betrayal, but it is great watching her get increasingly frustrated, and Raylan grow frustrated in response. (In a way, we’re fully empathising with a Justified Idiot, as well as Raylan for having to deal with them.
There’s no Art and honestly my biggest laugh is pretty clearly split between these three:
“Honestly? I’d kinda like to yell at you some more.”
“You want him slapped like a little girl, you do it!”
“Feecus stabbed himself to get Ava put away. So you’ll understand that the revelation that he lives with his parents doesn’t blow my mind.”
Top Ownage: Those guys blowing themselves the fuck up.
Elementary, “Female of the Species” – Joan is reeling from the death of ber boyfriend, who was killed because the poison meant for Joan was put in the wrong coffee cup, and from the discovery that this was the doing of the drug baroness Joan sent to prison in the season premiere. After some soul searching Joan concludes that she cannot have a normal life if she is going to be a detective, and wants to move to Sherlock’s brownstone. Within the contours of the show this makes sense but last I checked most people who solve crimes for a living (including characters on this show) have normal if stressful lives. No matter. And besides, the druglord is herself killed on orders from Moriarty since Holmes and Watson can only have one nemesis. Of much more note is the mystery of the week, where Holmes asks Bell for his help in Joan’s absence to find two missing pregnant zebras, stolen from the Bronx Zoo. The pairing makes a nice change, since Bell’s style is not as naturally complimentary as Joan’s, but also the case takes a fun twist when it turns out the zebras are carrying not baby zebras but quaggas (a species extinct since 1883, and yes, people are trying to reverse its extinction after a fashion). This one also has a scene show near the Bronx Zoo in a snowstorm that is very picturesque. I haven’t noted it much, but I don’t think I have ever seen an NYC-based show that makes so much use of all five boroughs as filming locations.
World Cup – caught the last 35 minutes or so of Argentina vs Egypt, which was an astonishing match. Understandable that Egypt feel a little aggrieved by the result but Argentina did play some exhilarating attacking football, eventually. And then I caught all of Switzerland vs Colombia, which was pretty dull on the whole. Switzerland’s stifling, defensive gameplan won out in the end, but I don’t think it’ll get them any further.
House of the Dragon – All caught up. Some visual issues aren’t as glaring and Mysaria has audibly gotten better at line readings. (That’s good!) Metaphors and symbols for obviousness abound though and I outright booed Jace’s slow motion grief hallucination. (That’s bad.) Rhanaeyra feeds the nobility rats and tells them she’s gonna raid their hoarded goods, ownage. (That’s good!) Still some papered over logic holes and I wonder if the show will really have time to make Rhanaeyra the Red Queen. (Can I go now?) I did like that Rhanaeyra’s bleeding on the day she’s coronated and it’s an inconvenience, not the end of the world, and that Otto and Joseph’s grand final words are interrupted. Nope, thwack, fuck you, traitors.
Tales From The Crypt, “Carrion Justice” – Somewhere between Greed/McTeague* and The Hitchhiker lies this episode, written and directed by Stephen E. DeSouza of Die Hard script fame and…Street Fighter. Kyle MacLachlan is having a great time even in presumably very hot location weather as a killer on the run for the Mexican border while pursued by a dogged state trooper. The best episodes here have nasty twists and turns, and this has at least two excellent ones. (The trooper swallowing the key rocks.)
*Have not seen the movie, I did read the novel because it’s on Bowies 100 Books list.
Newman at his peak, and at a time in his career when he didn’t always play likeable cads. I don’t blame Paul for veering away from roles like this, but he was really good at it.
He really was. I feel like not all actors can–or are willing to–adjust their level of charm in the same way.
Andy Griffith was apparently rattled when he saw A Face In The Crowd by his own performance and happily played friendly Andy Griffith types, but hell, he was good at evil bastards!
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!