Critics reviews

Shot in black and white, the film evokes a tempered nostalgia for a grittier but simpler West. As David Kehr put it, the film puts "a little too much dust in the dust bowl," but it is nonetheless effective in drawing a stark contrast between rudderless Hud and his principled father; where the west was and where it is going.

Hud's father is utterly false as a character because he refers back to a legend in which the authors of Hud have never believed. Directors like Ford and Ophuls, who genuinely mourn the past, never malign the present, whereas a dude director like Martin Ritt would have deplored the Old West in much the same obvious terms he deplores the New.