Critics reviews

A critical and box-office bomb when it came out in 1994, the big business comedy-fantasy "The Hudsucker Proxy" looks better and smarter by the year. . . . The tone of "Hudsucker" is madcap, the scale epic, and the script is a pastiche of elements taken from filmmakers that the Coens adore but who wouldn't ordinarily seem compatible (indeed, most critics argued that they still weren't compatible).

Many were unable to connect with the characters despite the film's winning humor and fine cast. True, the story feels a bit overdetermined. But it's ravishing, and includes one of Jennifer Jason Leigh's finest performances, doing a dead-on impression of a sassy, fast-talking reporter straight out of Hollywood's golden age.

February 1, 2014: Whereas the comedies of the 1930s and '40s could talk quickly and move quickly, they couldn't run at a full gallop like the Coen Brothers. Their camera soars, traveling at the speed of progress, gossip, capitalism itself. Everything races at top speed. The production design, the one thing everyone felt comfortable praising, is a marvel. Every frame doubles as a survey of early modern art, from Art Deco to Futurism.

The Hudsucker Proxy is the last film of the Coen's high symbolic period, capping a stylistic trilogy that includes Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. The movie's interest in the doomed repetition of history and the eternal dark side of human nature could hardly be more.

I suppose I wouldn't be this exasperated if the Coens didn't keep expressing more contempt for period verisimilitude from one picture to the next... If cartoony silliness was their aim, why couldn't they have looked at 50s cartoons a little more and 30s and 40s comedies a little less?