If you’re going to be a cad, a prick, an unabashed pussy hound, and by far the most self-serving cynic in the history of the cinema, it’s best to look like Paul Newman. Whatever your sins – coarse depravity, greed, drunkenness rivaling the Barrymore of your choosing – it all washes down much easier with icy blue eyes and head-to-toe dreaminess. He’s one of the few onscreen talents who could spend a career doing whatever the fuck he pleases, while still coming off as selfless and pure. Hell, his Hud Bannon all but rapes a woman like an animal in heat, and it’s still not enough to turn us against him. Just like the distinctions between sexual harassment and innocent flirtation are determined solely by the relative attractiveness of the man doing the harassing (or the flirting), we simply cannot condemn anyone who has the ability to cause a stampede simply by removing his shirt. Yes, it’s male privilege. But more than that, it’s simple biology. A joke just ain’t as funny when the teller has you averting your gaze with revulsion.
What I love most about Hud in Hud is that, for all the tight jeans, defiant swagger, and willingness to wrestle a pig, he’s a veritable quote machine, like some Mark Twain of the Texas Panhandle. Name it, he’s got an opinion on it, and he’s never anything but spot on:
On mortality: “Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.”
On love: “The only question I ever ask any woman is ‘What time is your husband coming home?’”
On aging: “Get all the good you can out of seventeen ‘cause it sure wears out in one hell of a hurry.”
On compassion: “You don’t look out for yourself, the only helping hand you’ll ever get is when they lower the box.”
On global affairs: “The world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get into it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not.”
One after the other, fired directly into the heart of either a sanctimonious father or a naïve, too-trusting nephew. The former has given up on the lad, furious as hell that he’s forced to entrust his legacy to a man just as apt to lose it all in a poker game, while the latter envies him from a casual distance; still believing but losing hope by the day. And yet, despite inhabiting the poles for each man in turn, he is, truly, everything rolled into one. A hard-working bum. A loyal cheater. A sensible maniac. Dishonest to the core, but unafraid to traffic in uncomfortable truths.
Still, Hud endures, if only because he’s arguably the most American of men. A visionary of sorts, who sees beyond the crippling limitations of tradition for its own sake. Ranching is all well and good, but these are the Sixties, and there’s oil in that ground you so mindlessly sanctify. Avarice to some, beautiful ambition to another. Hud’s dad clings to the past, believing that any man worth his salt must be measured by the sweat and grime that accumulate on his brow. If you need a shower after work, you done good. Hud, meanwhile, would rather watch money being made on his behalf, and what’s so wrong about putting your feet up while the dollars accumulate? A generational war, yes, but on a much deeper level, as old as the Jeffersonian fight against Hamiltonian industry. One believes in romance, poetry. Nobility and devotion that can be secured with a handshake. The other, a cold hard reality that needs a signed contract. Preferably one teeming with escape clauses. We’re all aware who won on points, and Hud simply wants to join the party before it’s too late.
Hud’s most insidious and complicated turn occurs deep into the film, when dear old dad is forced to slaughter his entire herd because they’ve been infected by foot-and-mouth disease. Coming less than twenty years after the Holocaust, it’s a difficult scene to digest, pregnant as it is with allegorical weight. Naturally, though, before the final mass killing, Hud wants to pawn off the sick animals onto an unsuspecting buyer, an act that would not only cheat a man out of a great deal of money, but one that would spread the epidemic to other corners of the state. It is, to be blunt, an idea beneath contempt. But that’s Hud. A man who can force any good woman to breathlessly pause as he passes by, but then, as he turns on his heel, drive a knife right into your back. The only principle he respects is that the ends forever and always justify the means. And a father is just another obstacle in your way. Get him before he gets you. It would seem like no way to live, but I defy you to find many who haven’t done exactly that.
But getting back to the original point, it’s beyond debate that had Hud resembled Ernest Borgnine, he’d be a villain so obvious, he’d be rejected by the cheapest of melodramas. Instead, we get to affix the label of “anti-hero” to our man Hud, which is just another way of saying he’s a criminal you’d be willing to fuck. He’s hateful right down to his boots, but those same boots will undoubtedly be bedside after a few beers and a short walk in the desert air. Which is fine. I’m here to lay out the facts, not sit back in judgment. If I had Newman’s charms, you’d better believe that I’d push every button within shouting distance, just to see what I could get away with. Somewhere around the two hundredth one-night stand, I might relent and admit my point had been made. More likely, though, I’d soldier on, taking advantage of a fairer sex so predictable, they almost seem dredged up from fiction. Maybe it’s no more complicated than us feeling obligated to loathe the bastard because he sees it all too clearly. A man out of time because he’s always so ahead of it. The man we’d always like to be, only never having the courage to admit it.
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