Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the consequences. There is bitter conflict between the callous Hud and his stern and highly principled father, Homer. Hud’s nephew Lon admires Hud’s cheating ways, though he soon becomes aware of Hud’s reckless amorality to bear him anymore. In the world of the takers and the taken, Hud is a winner. He’s a cheat, but, he explains “I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner.” –IMDb
American film director Martin Ritt started out as a Broadway actor. Ritt’s stage role as “Gleason” in Winged Victory brought him to Hollywood for the film version, for which the studio publicity billed him, along with the rest of the male cast, by the rank he held in the Army (Private First Class Martin Ritt). A victim of the Hollywood blacklist, Ritt’s career came to a standstill in the early 1950s. He reemerged, not as an actor, but as a director for the 1956 film Edge of the City. A favorite of actor Paul Newman, Ritt directed Newman in The Long Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), Hud (1963), The Outrage (1964) and Hombre (1967). Other Ritt-directed films of note were Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), Cross Creek (1984), Murphy’s Romance (1985), and, his last film, Stanley and Iris (1990). If there doesn’t seem to be a central throughline in these films it was because Ritt steadfastly refused to be typecast as a director. One project that brought… read more
Nope, scratch what I said about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is DEFINITELY Newman's best performance.
Or: The Second to Last Picture Show. Ritt's McMurtry adaptation, made almost ten years before Bogdanovich's, looks,feels and sounds an awful lot like its successor; I found myself appreciating it primarily as a prequel, one that adds depth and dimension to a beloved film. On its own terms it's a sturdy piece of filmmaking marked by strong performances, but it's workmanlike and lugubrious next to its younger sibling.
It looks like it could be an emotional or touching family drama but it lacks or is missing something. Really really like Patricia Neal’s performance here. So smooth and so seductive.
For this year’s incarnation of the Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow, someone had the excellent idea of commissioning the artist formerly
"Actress Patricia Neal, who rebuilt a troubled career to win an Academy Award only to face a more desperate battle for survival when three
In Hud, the title character is a total bastard of a man, relentless, and without a care for anything and everything except himself, and delivered raw with nothing less than Newman’s acting genius… read review
