The Men We Admire: Hud (1963) on Criterion

Hud isn’t an elegy of the West or revisionist subversion of frontier mythology. The film’s more Wendell Berry than Zane Grey. Homer’s attachment to the land is a communitarian, agrarian defence against the expanding plague of vulgar individualism and self-defeating materialism. At best, Hud’s an inversion of Western film anxieties about the violence and greed of settler colonialism. It suggests an established, civilized order undone by social atomism and greed.

* * *

Hud (1963) was released in July 2026 on 4K and Blu-Ray as part of the Criterion Collection, with an essay by Gabriel Miller and numerous interviews. One of the finest American films of its age, Hud continues to speak to us today. It began with the debut novel of writer Larry McMurtry. Horseman, Pass By (1961) cast a cold eye on the Texan’s hometown. Archer City sits in Northwest Texas, at the hinge point between the Deep South and the West. It’s a world of cowboys, cattle, trains, and country music. And whippoorwills. The book was the first of the writer’s Thalia Cycle (1961–66), with Thalia standing in for the town. The vivid imagery and rich authenticity of this early work lent itself to several film adaptations. In addition to Horseman Pass By, Leaving Cheyenne (1963) became Lovin” Molly (1974) and the best-known, The Last Picture Show (1966), was adapted and filmed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1970.

McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By was not a paean to the past. Or to Western myth. It was focused on the writer’s present and the country’s future. Its central character is the young Lon Bannon. Told in the first person, it’s a subjective coming-of-age, or “getting of wisdom,” story in which Lonnie must choose between the moralism of his grandfather Homer and the narcissism of his uncle Hud. Between principle and pleasure. The novel told in the first person, with everything filtered through Lon. The film’s apparently more objective perspective, and the contributions of the screenwriters, gives the dialogue a more explicit edge. “Little by little,” Homer tells Lon, “the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. . . . You’re just gonna have to make up your own mind one day. About what’s right and what’s wrong.” Ironically, the response to Hud would make clear to its creators that many men the American public admired weren’t admirable.

The novel was adapted for the screen by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.1 The two met on a writers training program in the mid-1940s. They married soon afterward. Each worked independently as screenwriters for a decade before their first collaboration. That joint script was for The Long, Hot Summer (1958), with director Martin Ritt. It was one of two adaptations the couple would produce from the work of William Faulkner. The film was also the first of eight projects on which Ravetch, Frank, and Ritt worked together. And, not unimportantly, it starred Paul Newman. The actor would work with Ritt on six films together between 1958 and 1967.

The Long, Hot Summer was, unintentionally, a cartoonish Southern Gothic, CinemaScope parody of the American South. It’s Faulkner’s Mississippi, by way of the titillation of a knock-off Tennessee Williams. Or Hurry Sundown (1967), with more sexuality but less sex. The Long, Hot Summer’s not entirely without merit. It served as Newman’s dry run for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and, even more critically, for his subsequent marriage to Joanne Woodward. For their part, Ravetch and Frank acknowledged that the melodramatic adaptation retained very little of the Faulkner original. The distance between the caricatured clichés of The Long, Hot Summer and the more grounded rural realism of Hud is difficult to overstate.

Director Martin Ritt was arguably as much activist as auteur. The New Yorker worked with Elia Kazan before becoming a successful television director and producer. Because Ritt rubbed shoulders with communists and his work was obviously left-leaning, he was subsequently blacklisted in the television industry. He slowly rebuilt his career by directing feature films, becoming one of the most popular directors of his time. Ritt’s filmography included No Down Payment (1957), with Woodward, and the Cold War classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). Later, the director would add several fine films set in the South, including Sounder (1972), Conrack (1974), and Norma Rae (1979).

Hud was the first of four films in which Ritt collaborated with James Wong Howe. The Chinese-born American cinematographer had four decades of professional experience, dating back to silent films. He shot Hud with black-and-white elegance and economy, making full use of the Panavision frame for its dusty, wide-open spaces. Motionless medium shots, group shots and two shots, all in deep focus, dominate the film. Ritt paired these images with Elmer Bernstein’s sparse soundtrack and diegetic country tunes. Despite being a contemporary film, Hud’s on-screen music was little different from that of The Last Picture Show, set a decade earlier. And Hud’s musical highlight might be the rousing rendition of “Oh, My Darling Clementine” in its smalltown cinema. Lonnie and Homer belt out the song in rhythm to an on-screen bouncing ball.

* * *

Ritt’s cinematic symphony starts from Hud’s opening scene. To the strains of Spanish-style guitar playing, we see the Texas sun at dawn. Long shots establish land, lots of land, in an arid landscape with few trees. The highway’s flanked instead by telephone poles, fading into the distance, like so many cemetery crosses. A truck crosses the frame, with a horse in the trailer behind it. A teenager’s inside, with a cowboy hat, a denim jacket, and a pocket radio, from which we hear the muted, tinny sounds of Roy Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball.” The young man hops out in the sleepy town, grabs donuts on smalltown trust in a café that will remind modern viewers again of The Last Picture Show. And Lon searches for his uncle’s 1958 Cadillac convertible. He quickly locates it outside of the home of the married woman Hud had pursued the night before.

Despite its title, some reviews, and the film’s legacy, its main character isn’t Hud. Like the novel, Hud’s intended focus is seventeen-year-old Lon (Brandon deWilde), though Ravetch and Frank streamlined the relationships of it male characters. Orphaned young by the loss of his parents, Lon’s been cared for by his grandfather Homer (Melvyn Douglas). The latter’s stoic and slow-moving, a bronco long broken by time, by familial and social obligations. Half his father’s age, Hud (Paul Newman)’s a rounder, a womanizer who works, when he chooses to, on the ranch. As portrayed by Newman, often in a sweaty undershirt, he oozes masculinity and sexuality. Unlike the novel, Homer’s a widower and there’s no female Bannon in the home. All three rely, in different ways, on Alma (Patricia Neal), the family’s live-in housekeeper. Amidst these three men and three generations, Alma is the grounded, feminine centre of the ranch. And the film.

Hats and cattle don’t a neo-Western make. That subgenre is meaningful but probably best applied to films (1) employing the stylistic and thematic conventions of Westerns and (2) set outside of the frontier period (ca. 1850–1914), perhaps outside the frontier entirely. Hud isn’t an elegy of the West or revisionist subversion of frontier mythology. The film’s more Wendell Berry than Zane Grey. Homer’s attachment to the land is a communitarian, agrarian defence against the expanding plague of vulgar individualism and self-defeating materialism. At best, Hud’s an inversion of Western film anxieties about the violence and greed of settler colonialism. It suggests an established, civilized order undone by social atomism and greed. It’s concerned with its present, with President Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” Indeed, Hud was released only six months before the president’s assassination in nearby Dallas. He was succeeded by a tall Texan who burnished JFK’s legacy with a deeply progressive agenda before blotting his own reputation in Vietnam.

Both contemporary social norms and laws are central to Hud. Homer emphasizes the importance of the rule of law, of adherence to its precepts, both on principle and for practical reasons. Implicit in his actions is the idea that the legal order represents social consensus in the interests of the common good. In contrast, Hud notes, “I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. That’s what I try to do myself. Sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.”2 For him, laws and other norms are mere means to be manipulated in the pursuit of his happiness, whatever end he pursues. This code doesn’t generate a universal, categorical imperative. It’s one element of his Hobbesian egoism, in which the “world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get into it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not.” With such a worldview, kindness and care are weaknesses, cons for rubes too naive to recognize reality.

Beyond selfishness, Hud has no meaningful ideology. And little empathy. His modus operandi is “if I don’t get it one way, I’ll get it another.” When Homer’s cattle appear to have hoof-and-mouth disease and may be subject to government culling to avoid a nationwide pandemic, Hud’s willing to unload the sick animals on others, unconcerned about the wider costs (perhaps even to Homer and himself). Again, Hud believes his transactional self-regard is the way of the world, endemic throughout American society:

This country is run on epidemics; where you been? Price-fixing, crooked TV shows, inflated expense accounts. How many honest men you know? Why, if you separate the saints from the sinners, you’re lucky to wind up with Abraham Lincoln. Now I want out of this spread what I put into it, so let’s dip our bread into that gravy while it’s still hot!3

To this all-too-familiar cynicism and self-regard, Homer responds bluntly, “You’re an unprincipled man, Hud.” Hud is, in to coin a phrase, full of shit.

While Hud tries to suggest that Homer is morally rigid, neither he nor Lonnie imagine themselves saints. When Lon tells his grandfather about his hope for a car, he doesn’t leave out his desire for girls. We know, too, that Lon hides pictures of pin-ups in his room. And he’ll tell us himself about his feelings, celibate and sexual, for Alma. But Hud mocks Homer by reminding him about his own sexuality, that “Wild Horse Homer Bannon” once sowed his oats, too. In contrast, the old man is gruff but self-critical. He wonders aloud if he was too hard on Hud. But his negative judgement of his son, with that of the filmmakers, is aimed at Hud’s greed and dishonesty. If Homer disapproves of Hud’s romantic liaisons in the film, it’s easy to imagine that this is rooted in the dishonesty inherent in such infidelity, not its sexuality. Homer’s principled. He’s not a prude.

The differences between father and son come to a head late in the film, with Lon as audience. Hud’s assumed that his father’s feelings were rooted in the recklessness that resulted in the car crash that killed Norman, his brother and Lon’s father. Hud was driving and presumably drunk. But Homer clarifies that his disgust is instead rooted in Hud’s wider indifference toward others:

You don’t give a damn. That’s all. That’s the whole of it. . . . You don’t care for people. You don’t give a damn about ’em. . . . You got all that charm going for you, and it makes the youngsters want to be like you. That’s the shame of it, ’cause 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.

If this language echoes Proverbs (23: 20-21), there’s little explicit religion in the novel or film, despite their settings. Unlike the central role of the cinema, here and in The Last Picture Show, the church is only seen at the funeral at the film’s end. After his grandfather’s death, Lon expresses anger at comforting Christian bromides. When he’s told that Homer’s “gone to a better place,” he snaps back, “I don’t think so. Unless dirt is a better place than air.’

Hud’s appetites force the Bannon household to unravel. Already scheming to steal Homer’s land and inheritance, his assault on Alma leads to her departure. If viewers might feel that the film doesn’t express sufficient outrage about this attempted rape, the secondhand impact on Lon is obvious and profound. While he was attracted to Alma – an even more complex emotion in the novel, where she was a Black woman – Lon recognizes her role in keeping the family anchored and together. After her exodus, Hud shrugs, minimizes his actions, and more aggressively pressures Homer for control of the ranch, not least through legal manipulation. Like the vultures circling earlier in the film, Hud’s eager to exploit the opportunities death provides. Exhausted, Homer nods and the scales finally fall from Lonnie’s eyes. Hud is an unprincipled man, unfit to live with.

Hud received seven Oscar nominations: for Ritt, Ravetch and Frank, Howe, Douglas, Neal, and Newman. Howe won for best black-and-white cinematography. Douglas and Neal each won for their roles. Overlooked but arguably deserving, deWilde accepted Douglas’s award on his behalf. More than a decade before Hud, the nine-year-old deWilde played the young Joey in Shane. That film, shot in 1951 and released in 1953, ended with its namesake hero, a reluctant gunfighter, riding away from the community. Joey cries out to him to return. In the context of Western films and mythology, the lesson seemed to be that violence was both necessary for the civilizing process and inimical to civilization. As Hud ends, Lon leaves his uncle’s incivility behind, brushing off his entreaties to stay, leaving Hud alone with his appetites. Its lesson seemed clear.4

 

After Hud’s release, however, many filmgoers found in it a moral strikingly at odds with Lon’s conclusion and its creators’ intentions. The man viewers admired was Hud, not Homer. Many seemed indifferent to the former’s machinations, celebrating his masculinity and vulgar materialism. As Ravetch said in an interview forty years later:

Here’s a man – Hud – who tries to rape his housekeeper, who wants to sell his neighbors poisoned cattle, and who stops at nothing to take control of his father’s property. And all the time, he’s completely unrepentant. Then, at the first screenings, the preview cards asked the audiences, “Which character did you most admire?” and many of them answered, “Hud.” We were completely astonished. Obviously, audiences loved Hud, and it sent us into a tailspin. The whole point of all our work on that picture was apparently undone because Paul was so charismatic.5

Even the studio capitalized on this charisma. One of the film’s posters shows Hud posing, hand on hip like a runway model. Cigarette in hand, it’s easy to imagine he’s just stepped away from another romantic conquest, maybe one step ahead of a jealous husband. Hopefully, with the woman’s consent.

Hud’s creators wanted to counter the moral contagion its namesake represented. They sought to do this, in part, by portraying Hud’s recalcitrance, his failure to repent, and his regret. Instead, in a country already too ill to recognize the symptoms of its disease, Hud often spread the virus.

Works Consulted and Cited

Baer, William. “Hud: A Conversation with Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr” (2003) 42 Michigan Quarterly Review.

McMurtry, Larry. Horseman, Pass By. Harper, 1961.

Miller, Gabriel, Hud: No Place for Heroes. Article included in booklet accompanying 4K and Blu-ray releases of Hud. Criterion Collection, 2026.

Ravetch, Irving and Harriet Frank, Jr. Hud, Norma Rae, and The Long Hot Summer: Three Screenplays. Plume, 1988.

William Butler Yeats. “Under Ben Bulbin” in Last Poems and Two Plays. Cuala Press, 1938.

* * *

Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.