In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Hud (1963)
Directed by Martin Ritt
Screenplay by Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr., based on the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
Produced by Irving Ravetch, Martin Ritt
112 minutes

More of a chamber piece than a symphonic event, Martin Ritt’s lush adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s debut 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By is a finely tuned frontier opera, pitched against character, environment and morality rather than the stale conventions of the western genre. Screenwriter-producer Irving Ravetch adapted The Long, Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury with his wife Harriet Frank Jr. and pulled McMurtry’s novel off an airport paperback rack during a layover in Dallas. Along with Ritt and Paul Newman — his partners in Salem Productions — Ravetch sold Paramount on the project. Riffing off alternate titles suggested by McMurtry, the filmmakers selected Hud. Two weeks of location shooting would commence July 1962 in Amarillo, Texas while interiors and rear projection were shot on the Paramount lot in Hollywood over four weeks.

The remarkable thing about Hud is how grounded it is. The action is limited to a bar brawl, livestock quarantine and one character passing away. While changes were made to McMurtry’s novel — the role of the housekeeper was expanded and sexual tension heightened between her and Hud — the story feels natural as opposed to being hopped up with froth. It’s given an edge by Newman’s dedication to playing one of the screen’s great bad boys, an irredeemable bastard who starts out no-good and ends that way, without lessons or hugs. Elmer Bernstein’s musical score is sparse but powerful, relying on little more than a Spanish guitar, while nearly everyone else in the production received Academy Award nominations. Taking home richly deserved Oscars were Patricia Neal (Best Actress), Melvyn Douglas (Best Supporting Actor) and James Wong Howe (Best Cinematography).

As the sun rises in the Texas Panhandle, 17-year-old Lonnie Bannon (Brandon de Wilde) hitchhikes into town in search of his hell raising uncle Hud. Locating his uncle’s pink Cadillac parked outside the abode of a married woman, Lonnie rousts Hud Bannon (Paul Newman) with news that his grandfather needs to see him. Escaping just as the woman’s husband makes it home, Hud and Lonnie return to the family ranch, where live-in housekeeper Alma Brown (Patricia Neal) cares for the men. Hud’s father Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas) takes the boys out to inspect a heifer that’s been found dead. Homer is barely able to conceal contempt for his only surviving son — who’s more focused on his nightlife than the condition of their livestock — and remains watchful when young Lonnie starts spending more time with Hud.

Homer calls in a government vet to inspect the dead heifer and is instructed to start gathering his herd; if tests come back positive for foot and mouth disease, every animal on the ranch will have to be liquidated, even if it means a catastrophic financial loss for the Bannons. Hud suggests selling the herd before the results come back, but his father’s principles prevent him from even considering such a thing. Feeling embittered, Hud starts looking for legal means to wrest control of the ranch out from under the old man. He also turns his charm on Alma, a self-sufficient divorcee who hasn’t responded to Hud’s flirtations, but hasn’t exactly dissuaded them either. Waiting for the vet to decide on the fate of the ranch, Homer’s health declines, Hud and Alma draw closer to a confrontation and Lonnie struggles to become his own man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,934 users: 86% for Hud

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Synopsis
“I came to America in 1914, by way of Philadelphia. That’s where I got off the boat. And then I came to Baltimore. It was the most beautiful place you have ever seen in your life.” This begins the oft-repeated story Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) tells to his grandchildren. Sam’s remembrances include entering the wallpaper business with his four brothers. Presiding over Thanksgiving dinner, Sam debates his brother Gabriel (Lou Jacobi) over which year it was that they brought their father to America.

Sam’s son Jules (Aidan Quinn) is a door-to-door salesman. His cousin Izzy (Kevin Pollak) promises him that with all the money out there after the war, the time is right to go into business. His wife Ann (Elizabeth Perkins) is tentative, but when a mugger stabs Jules on his rounds – while his young son Michael (Elijah Wood) watches – the men open a discount appliance store. Their main inventory is a new fad called television. The business is a huge moneymaker.

Success prompts Jules to move his immediate family to the suburbs, severing them from the larger family network. Sam’s wife Eva (Joan Plowright) – who refuses to ride in a car if her daughter-in-law is driving – chides Ann so much that the grandparents are moved into a separate house. This distresses Michael. The boy’s love for cliffhangers has developed into a habit of playing with fire, and he blames himself for a blaze that erupts at his father’s store. Michael confides this to his grandfather, who urges the boy to tell the truth.

Production history
After winning an Academy Award for directing Rain Man, writer-director Barry Levinson turned to an idea that had been nagging him since he’d shot his debut film Diner. One line of dialogue had gotten into his head and stayed there: “If I knew things would no longer be, I would have remembered them better.” Levinson had grown up in a middle class Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore of the 1950s, with grandparents and other relatives living only a street away. His father was in the discount appliance business.

It occurred to Levinson that his sense of family began to change once the role of storyteller shifted from the head of the family to a television set. “Television has had an enormous impact. It permeates our lives, it changes how we function, it affects how we relate to one another. Really, it takes over everything.” Out of his mourning for the dissolution of the traditional family – and stories his grandfather passed down to him – Levinson began writing a script called The Family.

Changes in transportation and the growth of the suburbs also found their way into the script, which Levinson wanted to reflect the immigrant experience he had seen growing up, a Baltimore story as opposed to a New York one. Retitled Avalon, the film was released in October 1990 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. It garnered four Academy Award nominations – including Best Writing and Best Cinematography – but its lack of marquee actors left it largely ignored by audiences at the time.

The disconnect with audiences may have also been due to the fact that – like Diner – Levinson’s script unfolds as an album of memories, impressions and conversations, which taken on their own, seem pointless. A family circle meeting is interrupted by a circus parade. A street car smashes into Ann’s parked car, somehow validating her mother-in-law’s fear of women drivers. Gabriel disowns Sam when his brother cuts the Thanksgiving turkey before he arrives for dinner. These are really the major “events” of the film.

Opinion
Barry Levinson has made as many poor movies (Toys, Disclosure, Envy) as good ones (Good Morning Vietnam, Bugsy, Wag the Dog), but this film is the jewel of his career. On any list of the greatest movies about family ever made, Avalon is near the top. The Krichinskys are probably Polish, likely Jewish, but unlike most immigrants tales, where they come from makes absolutely no difference. This is a film about tradition, and what regrettably happens when families abandon their most neglected tradition: storytelling.

The characters may not seem to be the most complex – captured a bit here, a bit there – but the casting is exceptional, particularly Armin Mueller-Stahl as the family’s imaginative patriarch. The vibrant lighting by Allen Daviau and the melancholy musical score by Randy Newman culminate in career finest work. Levinson is never the least bit condescending toward the audience in his tragic portrait, filling Avalon with so many small rewards that it may take additional viewings to absorb how masterful the film truly is.

Gregory Dorr at The DVD Journal writes, “Despite its modest scale, Avalon is a sweeping, though intimate, epic. As the film patiently moves through its careful narrative, the Krichinsky family is so vividly realized that it becomes extended family to the audience, where every good time, conflict, and heartbreak feels wrenchingly personal.”

“Avalon charts in a realistic way the forces that have irreparably affected that nuclear unit of the past, but it doesn’t stop there. The emotional undertow of the film goes straight to the heart with its touching depictions of suburban childhood, marital phases, family feuds, and the delights of grandparenting,” writes Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat at Spirituality and Practice.

Scott Mignola at Common Sense Media says, “Watching Avalon is a little bit like sitting down to a big supper with an entire family: aunts, uncles, grandparents, kids running around, kicking each other under the table. You come away from it exhausted, bruised, but hopefully enriched by a good meal and a few generation’s worth of stories.”

© Joe Valdez