Hud

A critical analysis of Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), the film adaptation of the novel by Larry McMurtry, starring Paul Newman and with James Wong Howe’s Oscar-winning cinematography, from production through the film’s complicated reception.

Martin Ritt’s 1963 classic Hud is a quintessential Western. Update horses with pickup trucks and a pink Cadillac; barroom shootouts and fistfights with family drama and dysfunction; Indians, rustlers, and corrupt sheriffs with a deadly disease, and government...