Hud: No Place for Heroes

Essays—

Jul 14, 2026

In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal statement, and it demonstrates a clear control over his material that he maintained throughout the rest of his work. The film would go on to earn seven Oscar nominations—including one for Ritt—and win three, for actors Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas and cinematographer James Wong Howe.

Hud belongs to a series of films Ritt made during the sixties that tackled major cinematic genres, often shaping their traditional motifs to suit his evolving cultural vision. In fashioning this film, Ritt displays a sharp and penetrating take on the American landscape. Unlike two revisionist westerns released the year before, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, which evoke nostalgia over the passing of the Old West, Hud betrays no feelings of regret in deconstructing the western hero, instead exposing his macho persona as empty and amoral, his mythology as bankrupt.

Ritt got his start in theater and then live television during its formative period. He entered both worlds as an actor, working first for the Federal Theatre Project—an outgrowth of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration—whose head, Hallie Flanagan, felt that art was integral to the fabric of communities. Her vision of theater as a social force profoundly shaped the Group Theatre, which became the definitive influence on Ritt’s career and his artistic philosophy from the time he joined in 1937. The communal spirit of the Group stayed with Ritt, who regarded filmmaking as a collective experience, rejecting the cult of the director. This was not only a working method; the creation of community also became a thematic thread running through his films. Ritt liked to surround himself with people he trusted and valued, so he would collaborate repeatedly with Howe, editor Sidney Levin, cinematographer John A. Alonzo, and production designers Tambi Larsen and Walter Scott Herndon. This attitude extended to writers as well. Ritt loved working with husband-and-wife team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who together wrote the screenplays for eight of his films, including Hud, and with Walter Bernstein, who wrote two of Ritt’s most personal films, The Molly Maguires (1970) and The Front (1976).

Another profound influence on Ritt was Elia Kazan, who introduced him to the Group, first recommending him to teach Luther Adler to box for his starring role in Clifford Odets’s 1937 play Golden Boy. Ritt was also given a small part in the production. Kazan, of course, would go on to become America’s most important midcentury theater director as well as an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. The two would remain close until 1952, when Kazan named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This committee’s hearings, and the subsequent blacklisting of alleged communists by Hollywood studios, played a central role in Ritt’s life and affected his career in significant ways, including his directing and producing The Front, the first Hollywood film about the blacklist.

After World War II, Ritt had gravitated to the new medium of television and, between 1950 and 1952, found success acting in, directing, or producing more than one hundred dramas, primarily for the anthology series Danger and Somerset Maugham TV Theatre. His greatest triumph during this era, however, was his performance in the Danger episode “The Paper Box Kid,” written by Bernstein. One critic wrote that Ritt “may be the best actor on television.”

This period ended abruptly in 1952, when Ritt reported to work at CBS one day, only to find that he had been fired. He had been named in the newsletter Counterattack, published by three former FBI agents; it alleged that he had helped Communist Party locals of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. Ritt would use that incident in The Front.

Unlike many of his friends, however, Ritt was not named or subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. His blacklisting from the television industry was based on unproven accusations and guilt by association. Years later, Ritt stated that he was never a member of the Communist Party: “I was always a very left-wing liberal, and I agreed with the Communists a lot of the time, but I didn’t agree with them some of the time, and that was bitter and angry.” Most often, he described himself as a “humanist.”

After a period during which he supported himself by teaching acting, Ritt arrived in Hollywood to direct No Down Payment (1957) for producer Jerry Wald, after making his debut as a film director earlier the same year with Edge of the City, shot in New York. Ritt and Wald went on to collaborate on three films starring Paul Newman—The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962)—and the director and actor formed a close friendship. Hud came about when Ravetch, who had cowritten The Long, Hot Summer, came across Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By, and presented the project to Ritt and Newman, who had developed a partnership called Salem Productions in 1962.

The novel is a coming-of-age story filtered through the consciousness of teenager Lonnie Bannon, who has lost both his parents and is living with his grandfather Homer. Homer’s stepson, Hud, is a minor character—a mean, consummately selfish, and disreputable man who is also a drunk and a womanizer. By centering their screenplay around this hedonist, Ravetch and Frank felt they had found a powerful theme: “the greed and materialism that was beginning to take over America.” Though many had advised him against taking the role, Newman enthusiastically embraced the idea of playing a thoroughly detestable man. He had already portrayed an impressive list of antiheroes in From the Terrace (1960), The Hustler (1961), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), but none of these characters compared with Hud, whom the film’s publicity described as “the man with the barbed wire soul,” and whom Newman compared to Richard III.

Ravetch and Frank made other modifications, some to tighten the relationships and sharpen the thematic focus. Hud becomes the son of Homer (Melvyn Douglas) rather than his stepson, meaning that he is also the uncle of Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde). This strengthens the connection between the three generations of Bannons. The family’s cook, in the novel, is a Black woman named Halmea; she is called Alma in the film and played by the white actress Patricia Neal. Ritt did not feel that Hud’s pursuit of a Black woman would be accepted by audiences at the time.

Hud works best if thought of as a modern western. It deliberately plays off George Stevens’s classic western Shane (1953), which, like Hud, frames the titular figure through the eyes of a younger character—here a boy, Joey Starrett. America’s reverence for childhood is central to the thematic structure of Shane, a portal through which Stevens allowed audiences to escape into a mythic past and to rediscover a purer world than the one contaminated by the war and its aftermath.

Joey is played by Brandon de Wilde, whose casting as the teenage Lonnie Bannon in Hud becomes a direct link between the two films. Both deal with a youngster’s education as he observes the deeds of the protagonist. Shane is first seen by Joey as an idealized figure in buckskin, astride a horse. Stevens’s mise-en-scène even suggests that Joey’s view may be a boy’s romantic vision: Shane and his horse seem to glide across the stream as he approaches the Starrett ranch. Shane presents its hero, lightning-fast with his pearl-handled guns, as a messianic savior who descends from the mountains to defend an emerging town and its homesteaders from lawlessness. Although he had hoped to abandon his life of violence by settling down with the Starretts, Shane is eventually forced to kill to protect the settlers.

Hud is introduced when his nephew goes to town looking for him. Lonnie’s first clue comes from a bar owner who is sweeping up broken glass at his place, the result of a fight started by Hud. Lonnie then finds his uncle’s pink Cadillac parked in front of the house of a married woman. Hud emerges, buttoning his shirt, boots in hand—this is clearly not Shane.

Like most westerns, Hud opens with the landscape: vast, lonely, and almost desertlike. There are few signs of civilization. Howe explained that he wanted the cinematography to emphasize “the harsh skies and flat glare”; he even decided to filter out the clouds. This first shot is beautifully rendered in black and white, accented by a ray of sunlight. The emptiness is soon undercut by the sight of a truck pulling a horse trailer. Ritt is calling attention to the disjunction between horse and rider, no longer a graceful unit but instead separated in two vehicles. Standing in contrast to this mechanical world and to Hud, whose Cadillac embodies it, is Homer, who represents the Old West. The generational conflict between father and son forms the basis of Lonnie’s education.

The name Homer suggests his epic status. The owner of the cattle ranch where Hud and Lonnie live and work, he is in love with the land and feels a strong connection to nature and the wild. If Hud is linked to his car, Homer is associated with his two Texas longhorns, symbols of the pioneer lifestyle. They also evoke another classic western, Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), in which Thomas Dunson (John Wayne), starting with only two longhorns, founds a cattle empire and ultimately clashes with his surrogate son over its management. Hud, meanwhile, doesn’t do much of anything to contribute to the well-being of his father’s ranch.

To the shock and even chagrin of Ritt and Newman, upon the film’s release, viewers mostly gravitated toward Hud. Ritt underestimated his star’s magnetism, which triumphed over his character’s flaws. Hud also embodied what audiences have always admired about western heroes: their individualistic bravado, exemplified by Hud’s dislike for the government and the law. Newman’s performance also tempers the unpleasantness of his selfish persona: the twinkle in his eye, his offhand sweetness and sudden frankness, remain attractive despite the character’s unheroic behavior. Unlike the more inarticulate rebels of the fifties, Newman’s alienated misfits are typically garrulous, ironic, and witty. Ritt’s film often accentuates this unexpected charm, and even attempts to capitalize on Newman’s air of emotional vulnerability by suggesting that Hud’s harshness may have resulted from the death of his older brother—Lonnie’s father—for which Hud was in part responsible.

Another factor mitigating Hud’s iniquity is the overwhelming aura of death that permeates the film. Early in the story, Homer calls Hud home to examine a dead heifer on the property. When they drive out to look, Ritt cuts to a shot of buzzards in a tree, which fills the side of the frame. These vultures hold dominion over the scene, just as their image hovers over the rest of the film.

Against Hud’s advice, Homer brings in a government veterinarian, who concludes that the heifer died of foot-and-mouth disease and that all of the Bannon’s cattle must therefore be destroyed. This brutal, horrifying slaughter is the film’s most graphic sequence. The passive beasts are rounded up and herded into a large pit, where they are surrounded by ranch hands who shoot until all are dead. The sounds of the frightened, dying cattle and the rifle fire are all that we hear as the scene plays out.

When Hud inherits a share of the ranch at the film’s end, it seems probable that he will simply turn it over for lucrative oil drilling, which his father has steadfastly refused to do. His actions have hastened his father’s death; indeed, in the novel he actually shoots the dying Homer. Easily accommodating himself to the loss of the patriarch he has at least symbolically killed, Hud turns his attention to the looming oil deals that will consolidate his new position of power. Whereas in classic westerns the acquisition of land is seen as an opportunity to grow and build, in Hud Ritt demonstrates the heartless exploitation that lies in western expansionism.

At the conclusion of McMurtry’s novel, Lonnie, having rejected Hud, simply takes off for the open road in true American fashion. Catching a ride with a truck driver who remembers Homer, Lonnie seems to be returning in spirit to his grandfather. An early version of the screenplay closed the same way, but Ritt ultimately chose to end the film more brutally, by keeping the focus on Hud. After Lonnie says goodbye and walks away, Hud returns to the house alone, and the screen door slams behind him. Here, Ritt quotes John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which the departing figure of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is framed in a doorway and then disappears as the door swings shut. Ethan understands that, as Shane says, “there is no living with a killing,” and that there is no room for him in his united family. Hud, the amoral modern westerner, has instead taken over the ranch. Rejected by his nephew, whose ethical sense has been shaped by his grandfather, Hud is left alone inside the house and in possession of the future.

Hud: No Place for Heroes

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