Hud · reception & legacy
1963 · Martin Ritt
How Hud has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A hit in 1963 with three Oscars to show for it, Hud is now read as a proto-New Hollywood film — the moment the western's charming cowboy curdled into an antihero, years before Easy Rider made that fashionable.
What's debated
The eternal Hud debate: Ritt and Newman built him as a heel, audiences swooned anyway — Pauline Kael famously argued the film's moralizing backfired, and fans still argue over whether loving Hud means the movie failed or succeeded.
Its footprint
The tagline — 'Paul Newman is HUD... the man with the barbed wire soul' — is one of the great pieces of movie marketing, and Newman leaning in the doorway in James Wong Howe's black-and-white became shorthand for toxic cool.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' for Newman completists and western revisionists alike, endlessly rewatched for Howe's Panhandle photography and routinely called one of the best-acted American films of the '60s.