I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The English critics got even more out of it: Derek Prouse experienced a “catharsis” in The Sunday Times, as did Peter John Dyer in Sight and Sound. Dyer seems to react to cues from his experience at other movies; his review, suggesting as it does a super-fan’s identification with the film makers’ highest aspirations, is worth a little examination. “From the ominous discovery of the first dead heifer, to the massacre of the diseased herd, to Homer’s own end and Hud’s empty inheritance of a land he passively stood by and watched die, the story methodically unwinds like a python lying sated in the sun.” People will be going to Hud, as Charles Addams was reported to have gone to Cleopatra, “to see the snake.” Dyer squeezes out more meaning and lots more symbolism than the film makers could squeeze in. (A) Homer just suddenly up and died, of a broken heart, one supposes. It wasn’t prepared for, it was merely convenient. (B) Hud’s inheritance isn’t empty: he has a large ranch, and the land has oil. Dyer projects the notion of Hud’s emptiness as a human being onto his inheritance. (C) Hud didn’t passively stand by and watch the land die. The land hasn’t changed. Nor was Hud passive: he worked the ranch, and he certainly couldn’t be held responsible for the cattle becoming infected — unless Dyer wants to go so far as to view that infection as a symbol of or a punishment for Hud’s sickness. Even Homer, who blamed Hud for just about everything else, didn’t accuse him of infecting the cattle. Dyer would perhaps go that far, because somehow “the aridity of the cattle-less landscape mirrors his own barren future.” Why couldn’t it equally mirror Homer’s barren past? In this scheme of symbolic interpretation, if there was a dog on the ranch, and it had worms, Hud the worm would be the reason. Writing of the “terse and elemental polarity of the film,” Dyer says, “The earth is livelihood, freedom and death to Homer; an implacably hostile prison to Hud” — though it would be just as easy, and perhaps more true to the audience’s experience of the film, to interpret Hud’s opportunism as love of life and Homer’s righteousness as rigid and life-destroying — and unfair. The scriptwriters give Homer principles (which are hardly likely to move the audience); but they’re careful to show that Hud is misunderstood and rejected when he makes affectionate overtures to his father.

  Dyer loads meaning onto Hud’s actions and behavior: for example, “Instead of bronco-busting he goes in for a (doubtless) metaphorical bout of pig-wrestling.” Why “instead of” — as if there were bronco-busting to do and he dodged it — when there is nothing of the kind in the film? And what would the pig-wrestling be a metaphor for? Does Dyer take pigs to represent women, or does he mean that the pig-wrestling shows Hud’s swinishness? Having watched my older brothers trying to catch greased pigs in this traditional western small-town sport, I took the sequence as an indication of how boring and empty small-town life is, and how coarse the games in which the boys work off a little steam. I had seen the same boys who wrestled greased pigs and who had fairly crude ideas of sex and sport enter a blazing building to save the lives of panic-stricken horses, and emerge charred but at peace with the world and themselves.

  Are the reviewers trying to justify having enjoyed the movie, or just looking for an angle, when they interpret the illustrative details morally? Any number of them got their tip on Hud’s character by his taking advantage of a husband’s absence to go to bed with the wife. But he couldn’t very well make love to her when her husband was home — although that would be par for the course of “art” movies these days. The summer nights are very long on a western ranch. As a child, I could stretch out on a hammock on the porch and read an Oz book from cover to cover while my grandparents and uncles and aunts and parents didn’t stir from their card game. The young men get tired of playing cards. They either think about sex or try to do something about it. There isn’t much else to do — the life doesn’t exactly stimulate the imagination, though it does stimulate the senses. Dyer takes as proof of Hud’s bad character that “his appetites are reserved for married women.” What alternatives are there for a young man in a small town? Would it be proof of a good character to seduce young girls and wreck their reputations? There are always a few widows, of course, and, sometimes, a divorcee like Alma, the housekeeper. (Perhaps the first female equivalent of the “white Negro” in our films: Patricia Neal plays Alma as the original author Larry McMurtry described the Negro housekeeper, the “chuckling” Halmea with “her rich teasing laugh.”) But they can hardly supply the demand from the married men, who are in a better position to give them favors, jobs, presents, houses, and even farms. I remember my father taking me along when he visited our local widow: I played in the new barn which was being constructed by workmen who seemed to take their orders from my father. At six or seven, I was very proud of my father for being the protector of widows.

  I assumed the audience enjoyed and responded to Hud’s chasing women because this represented a break with western movie conventions and myths, and as the film was flouting these conventions and teasing the audience to enjoy the change, it didn’t occur to me that in this movie his activity would be construed as “bad.” But Crowther finds that the way Hud “indulges himself with his neighbor’s wife” is “one of the sure, unmistakable tokens of a dangerous social predator.” Is this knowledge derived from the film (where I didn’t discover it) or from Crowther’s knowledge of life? If the latter, I can only supply evidence against him from my own life. My father who was adulterous, and a Republican who, like Hud, was opposed to any government interference, was in no sense and in no one’s eyes a social predator. He was generous and kind, and democratic in the western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived.

  If Homer, like my father, had frequented married women or widows, would Dyer interpret that as a symbol of Homer’s evil? Or, as Homer voiced sentiments dear to the scriptwriters and critics, would his “transgressions” be interpreted as a touching indication of human frailty? What Dyer and others took for symbols were the clichés of melodrama — where character traits are sorted out and separated, one set of attitudes and behavior for the good characters, another for the bad characters. In melodrama, human desires and drives make a person weak or corrupt: the heroic must be the unblemished good like Homer, whose goodness is not tainted with understanding. Reading the cues this way, these critics missed what audiences were reacting to, just as Richard Whitehall in Films and Filming describes Newman’s Hud as “the-hair-on-the-chest-male” — although the most exposed movie chest since Valentino’s is just as hairless.

  I suppose we’re all supposed to react on cue to movie rape (or as is usually the case, attempted rape); rape, like a cattle massacre, is a box-office value. No doubt in Hud we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kauffmann says, “driven off by his [Hud’s] vicious physical assault.” But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because a frustrated rape is just too sordid and embarrassing for all concerned — for the drunken Hud who forced himself upon her, for her for defending herself so titanically, for young Lon the innocent who “saved” her. Alma obviously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him; she wants to be treated differently from the others. If Lon hadn’t rushed to protect his idealized view of her, chances are that the next morning Hud would have felt guilty and repentant, and Alma would have been grateful to him for having used the violence necessary to break down her resistance, thus proving that she was different. They might have been celebrating ritual rapes annually on their anniversaries.

  Rape is a strong word when a man knows that a woman wants him but won’t accept him unless he commits himself emotionally. Alma’s mixture of provocative camaraderie plus reservations invites “rape.” (Just as,
in a different way, Blanche DuBois did — though Williams erred in having her go mad: it was enough, it was really more, that she was broken, finished.) The scriptwriters for Hud, who, I daresay, are as familiar as critics with theories of melodrama, know that heroes and villains both want the same things and that it is their way of trying to get them that separates one from the other. They impart this knowledge to Alma, who tells Hud that she wanted him and he could have had her if he’d gone about it differently. But this kind of knowingness, employed to make the script more clever, more frank, more modern, puts a strain on the credibility of the melodramatic actions it explicates — and embellishes. Similarly, the writers invite a laugh by having Alma, seeing the nudes Lon has on his wall, say, “I’m a girl, they don’t do a thing for me.” Before the Kinsey report on women, a woman might say, “They don’t do a thing for me,” but she wouldn’t have prefaced it with “I’m a girl” because she wouldn’t have known that erotic reactions to pictures are not characteristic of women.

  The Ravetches have been highly praised for the screenplay: Penelope Gilliatt considers it “American writing at its abrasive best”; Brendan Gill says it is “honestly written”; Time calls it “a no-compromise script.” Dyer expresses a fairly general view when he says it’s “on a level of sophistication totally unexpected from their scripts for two of Ritt’s least successful, Faulkner-inspired films.” This has some special irony because not only is their technique in Hud a continuation of the episodic method they used in combining disparate Faulkner stories into The Long Hot Summer, but the dialogue quoted most appreciatively by the reviewers to illustrate their new skill (Alma’s rebuff of Hud, “No thanks, I’ve had one cold-hearted bastard in my life, I don’t want another”) is lifted almost verbatim from that earlier script (when it was Joanne Woodward telling off Paul Newman). They didn’t get acclaim for their integrity and honesty that time because, although the movie was entertaining and a box-office hit, the material was resolved as a jolly comedy, the actors and actresses were paired off, and Newman as Ben Quick the barn burner turned out not really to be a barn burner after all. They hadn’t yet found the “courage” that keeps Hud what Time called him, “an unregenerate heel” and “a cad to the end.” It may have taken them several years to learn that with enough close-ups of his blue, blue eyes and his hurt, sensitive mouth, Newman’s Ben Quick could have burned barns all right, and audiences would have loved him more for it.

  In neither film do the episodes and characters hold together, but Ritt, in the interim having made Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and failed to find a style appropriate to it, has now, with the aid of James Wong Howe’s black and white cinematography, found something like a reasonably clean visual equivalent for Hemingway’s prose. Visually Hud is so apparently simple and precise and unadorned, so skeletonic, that we may admire the bones without being quite sure of the name of the beast. This Westerner is part gangster, part Champion, part rebel-without-a-cause, part the traditional cynic-hero who pretends not to care because he cares so much. (And it is also part Edge of the City, at least the part about Hud’s having accidentally killed his brother and Homer’s blaming him for it. Ritt has plagiarized his first film in true hack style: the episode was integral in Edge of the City and the friendship of Cassavetes and Poitier — probably the most beautiful scenes Rid has directed — drew meaning from it; in Hud it’s a fancy “traumatic” substitute for explaining why Hud and Homer don’t get along.)

  When Time says Hud is “the most brazenly honest picture to be made in the U.S. this season” the key word is brazenly. The film brazens it out. In the New Yorker Brendan Gill writes, “It’s an attractive irony of the situation that, despite the integrity of its makers, Hud is bound to prove a box-office smash. I find this coincidence gratifying. Virtue is said to be its own reward, but money is nice, too, and I’m always pleased to see it flowing toward people who have had other things on their minds.” Believing in this coincidence is like believing in Santa Claus. Gill’s last sentence lacks another final “too.” In Hollywood, a “picture with integrity” is a moneymaking message picture. And that’s what Crowther means when he says, “Hud is a film that does its makers, the medium and Hollywood proud.” He means something similar when he calls his own praise of the film a “daring endorsement” — as if it placed him in some kind of jeopardy to be so forthright.

  If most of the critics who acclaimed the film appeared as innocent as Lon and as moralistic as Homer, Dwight Macdonald, who perceived that “it is poor Hud who is forced by the script to openly practice the actual as against the mythical American Way of Life” regarded this perception as proof of the stupidity of the film.

  But the movie wouldn’t necessarily be a good movie if its moral message was dramatically sustained in the story and action, and perhaps it isn’t necessarily a bad movie if its moral message is not sustained in the story and action. By all formal theories, a work that is split cannot be a work of art, but leaving the validity of these principles aside, do they hold for lesser works — not works of art but works of commerce and craftsmanship, sometimes fused by artistry? Is a commercial piece of entertainment (which may or may not aspire to be, or pretend to be, a work of art) necessarily a poor one if its material is confused or duplicit, or reveals elements at variance with its stated theme, or shows the divided intentions of the craftsmen who made it? My answer is no, that in some films the more ambivalence that comes through, the more the film may mean to us or the more fun it may be. The process by which an idea for a movie is turned into the product that reaches us is so involved, and so many compromises, cuts, and changes may have taken place, so much hope and disgust and spoilage and waste may be embodied in it or mummified in it, that the tension in the product, or some sense of urgency still left in it, may be our only contact with the life in which the product was processed. Commercial products in which we do not sense or experience divided hopes and aims and ideas may be the dullest — ones in which everything alive was processed out, or perhaps ones that were never alive even at the beginning. Hud is so astutely made and yet such a mess that it tells us much more than its message. It is redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty. It is perhaps an archetypal Hollywood movie: split in so many revealing ways that, like On the Waterfront or From Here to Eternity, it is the movie of its year (even though it’s shallow and not nearly so good a film as either of them).

  My friends were angry that I’d sent them to Hud because, like Macdonald, they “saw through it,” they saw that Hud was not the villain, and they knew that though he expressed vulgar notions that offended them, these notions might not be unpopular. The film itself flirts with this realization: when Homer is berating Hud, Lon asks, “Why pick on Hud, Grandpa? Nearly everybody around town is like him.”

  My friends, more or less socialist, detest a crude Hud who doesn’t believe in government interference because they believe in more, and more drastic, government action to integrate the schools and end discrimination in housing and employment. However, they are so anti-CIA that at Thanksgiving dinner a respected professor could drunkenly insist that he had positive proof that the CIA had engineered the murder of Kennedy with no voice but mine raised in doubt. They want centralized power when it works for their civil-libertarian aims, but they dread and fear its international policies. They hate cops but call them at the first hint of a prowler: they are split, and it shows in a million ways. I imagine they’re very like the people who made Hud, and like them they do rather well for themselves. They’re so careful to play the game at their jobs that if they hadn’t told you that they’re really screwing the system, you’d never guess it.

  [1964]

  II

  Retrospective Reviews:

  Movies Remembered with Pleasure

  The Earrings of Madame de . . .

  (1953)

  Madame de, a shallow, narcissistic beauty, has no more feeling for her husband than for his gifts: she sells the diamond earrings he gave her rather than confess her extravaga
nce and debts. Later, when she falls in love with Baron Donati, he presents her with the same pair of earrings and they become a token of life itself. Once she has experienced love she cannot live without it: she sacrifices her pride and honor to wear the jewels, she fondles them as if they were parts of her lover’s body. Deprived of the earrings and of the lover, she sickens . . . unto death.

  This tragedy of love, which begins in careless flirtation and passes from romance, to passion, to desperation is, ironically, set among an aristocracy that seems too superficial and sophisticated to take love tragically. Yet the passion that develops in this silly, vain, idle society woman not only consumes her but is strong enough to destroy three lives.

  The novella and the movie could scarcely be more unlike: the austere, almost mathematical style of Louise de Vilmorin becomes the framework, the logic underneath Ophuls’s lush, romantic treatment. In La Ronde he had used Schnitzler’s plot structure but changed the substance from a cynical view of sex as the plane where all social classes are joined and leveled (venereal disease is transmitted from one couple to another in this wry roundelay) — to a more general treatment of the failures of love. For Ophuls La Ronde became the world itself — a spinning carousel of romance, beauty, desire, passion, experience, regret. Although he uses the passage of the earrings as a plot motif in the same way that Louise de Vilmorin had, he deepens and enlarges the whole conception by the creation of a world in such flux that the earrings themselves become the only stable, recurrent element — and they, as they move through many hands, mean something different in each pair of hands, and something fatally different for Madame de because of the different hands they have passed through. It may not be accidental that the film suggests de Maupassant: between La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de . . . Ophuls had worked (rather unsuccessfully) on three de Maupassant stories which emerged as Le Plaisir.