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

17-year-old Lonnie Bannon (Brandon de Wilde) hitches a ride across the Texas plains. Arriving in town, he sets out to retrieve his Uncle Hud. There’s no sign of him, just the damage Hud inflicted the night before; broken glass outside a bar, his big Cadillac parked in front of a strange house, and a woman’s shoe in the yard. Lonnie rousts Hud (Paul Newman) with news of trouble at the ranch.

Hud’s cattle rancher father Homer (Melvyn Douglas) is worried by the unexplained death of one of their cows. He wants to call the state vet. Hud could care less, he just wants to get back into town to cavort. The vet suspects an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Hud urges his old man to sell their herd before the results come back, but the upright rancher is pained his wayward son would even consider that.

When his advances are spurned by the barbed housekeeper (Patricia Neal), Hud is so desperate for company he takes Lonnie into town. Uncle and nephew bond by participating in a saloon brawl. The impressionable youth is drawn to Hud’s dangerous charm, but Homer cautions his grandson, “You’re just going to have to make up your own mind one day about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Paul Newman and director Martin Ritt had already worked together on three pictures when they struck a partnership to produce films together. Newman felt that his screen performances in the Tennessee Williams plays Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth had been softened by the censors, and was eager to appear in something even more provocative.

Newman and Ritt chose to adapt Horseman, Pass By, the 1961 debut novel by Larry McMurtry. It was a thematically rich, sexually explicit variation on Catcher In The Rye told through the eyes of a teenager on a cattle ranch in Texas. Hud was the antagonist, but Newman and Ritt were attracted to the idea of building the film around his morally unredeemable character.

Husband and wife screenwriters Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr. adapted the script. They made a number of changes – relocating the story from North Texas to the Panhandle – but McMurtry would later comment, “The screenwriters erred badly in following my novel too closely.”

Right from the credits – which unveil Texas in the splendor of a black and white, widescreen frame, accompanied by Spanish guitar playing a folk melody – Hud is pitch perfect. Paul Newman gives one of the iconic performances of his career, playing a derelict bastard right up there with Clint Eastwood in Play Misty For Me or Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

Larry McMurtry’s characters possess an inner depth and complexity that contrasts beautifully with their “aw shucks” appearance, and the scripted dialogue between them is so good, honest and frequently witty. I’m typically bananas for any black and white movie shot in anamorphic widescreen, but James Wong Howe’s lighting is some of the most evocative of the period. I’d highly recommend this just for the cinematography alone.

Hud was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Well deserved winners were Patricia Neal for Best Actress, Melvyn Douglas for Best Supporting Actor, and James Wong Howe for Best Cinematography, Black and White. Elmer Bernstein composed the sparse but outstanding musical score. The film was shot partly in the town of Claude, 20 miles east of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.

Hud made the cut of The Greatest Films at the award-winning Filmsite.org.

DVD Beaver gives Hud mad props and supplies technical information for all you fans of bitrate.

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