Hud

“Not Brando in Streetcar, not Dean in Rebel, not Clift in Place in the Sun , it was Newman in Hud who redefined the American cinema protagonist. It’s the first time a bad guy has been presented without excuse or remorse. He has no apology or change of heart. And you can’t take your eyes off him. You think he’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.” Paul Schrader

In this landmark modern western adapted from Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Brandon de Wile — the kid from Shane — gets an unsentimental education for worshipping the wrong hero: his uncle, Paul Newman’s eponymous heel. More than any of his peers, the young Newman was willing to alienate our affections. In The Hustler and Hud he wasn’t really misunderstood so much as misjudged. He was venal, callous and craven. His looks were his trump card; he was a man women hated to love but couldn’t resist. Even in these boorish, brazen bastards he finds shards of innocence. “My mama loved me but then she died,” Hud Bannon says, and Newman’s bluntness buries the self-pity. Melvyn Douglas’s stern patriarch has a great speech about the evils of swapping farming for oil and the b&w photography by James Wong Howe is as good as it gets.

Hud as a character of his time embodied a new ethos (right or wrong) longing to break free from old norms and seeking acceptance. As a film, it marked the entry of a new type of Western, one that was more intimate, more cynical, and more authentic than those before it.

Roger Ebert