The title character of Hud, played by Paul Newman, is a psychopath, and just enough so that we envy him. To be unburdened by our conscience is something we often long for.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), for example, when the former title character drinks his potion and becomes the latter, his first words are “Free! Free!” Of course, Hyde is too evil for us to want to be like him.  After all, we don’t want to kill anyone. We just want to be able to have sex with a married woman and then point the finger at our nephew when we get caught, the way Hud does at the beginning of the movie.

It also helps that Hud is good looking, whereas Hyde is ugly.

Anyway, the movie is set on a cattle ranch owned by Hud’s father, Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas). Hud’s nephew is Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde). They have a maid, Alma (Patricia Neal).  At one point in the movie, while Hud is drunk, wearing a wife beater, and feeling ornery, he tries to rape Alma in the small shack she occupies right near the main house, but Lonnie grabs him and pulls him off her. Hud becomes so angry that he starts to hit Lonnie in the face, but he has just enough of a conscience to stay his hand. He gives up and leaves.

The movie was based on a novel, Horseman, Pass By, which I have not read, only summaries.  In that novel, the maid’s name is Halmea, and she is African American. Lonnie is unable to stop Hud from raping her and can only watch as Hud does so.

That the movie changed black Halmea into white Alma is not surprising. Even if the Production Code had allowed it, I’m not sure how audiences in 1963 would have reacted to seeing a white man rape a black woman.  However, there is another consideration other than that of race.  Had Hud in the movie actually raped Alma, we would have despised him for that, and the Production Code, if not just ordinary movie morality, would have required that he die in the end.  But since he failed in his attempt, as a result of what little conscience he had, what he did was forgivable.

Am I wrong to say that?  I might have hesitated in this regard were it not for the fact that a lot of people say that Alma wanted to be raped.  On my own, that thought would never have occurred to me.  After my mother saw the movie, however, she said that Alma wanted Hud to take her by force. My girlfriend said that Alma was irritated that Lonnie prevented Hud from raping her.  A third woman, Pauline Kael, said the same thing in her book I Lost It at the Movies:

Alma obviously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him; she wants to be treated differently from the others. If Lon hadn’t rushed in to protect his idealized view of her, chances are that the next morning Hud would have felt guilty and repentant, and Alma would have been grateful to him for having used the violence necessary to break down her resistance, thus proving that she was different.  They might have been celebrating ritual rapes annually on their anniversaries.

I still don’t see it.  But I’m just a man, so what do I know?

Before we get to that attempted rape in the movie, all the cattle on the Bannon ranch have to be destroyed because they have hoof-and-mouth disease. They contracted it when Homer bought some Mexican cows to add to his herd.  As a result, the Bannon family is impoverished.  It is suggested to Homer that he might drill for oil, but he doesn’t like the idea.  As a result, Hud gets a lawyer, intending to take possession of the ranch owing to his father’s incompetence. When Homer finds out about that, they start arguing. Hud says that he’s going to get control of the property, one way or the other. Homer replies:

Why, you’re badly mistaken about all this.  I’ll be the only one to run this ranch while I’m alive.  After that, you may get part of it.  I don’t know. But you can’t get control of this place. No way in the world.

Homer could have said that when he died, Hud and Lonnie would inherit the ranch, but he most decidedly did not say that.  He said that Hud may get part of the ranch.

Earlier in the movie, when they first find out the cattle are diseased, Hud says to Homer:

You’ve had twenty-four of my thirty-four years working for you on this ranch, and, Daddy, you’ve had top-grade cheap labor.  I’ve shoveled manure for you.  You’ve got my calluses. For what?  Your blessings the day you die? No, damn it. I want out of this spread what I put into it.

I will only add that Hud doesn’t even have his own place.  I can’t imagine being thirty-four years old and still living at home with my father.

A man with a lot of money will sometimes turn his children into slaves, getting them to spend their lives doing his bidding for the sake of an expected inheritance, only for him to decide late in life that his children are unworthy and leave it all to the church or to some teenage tart, figuring it’s his money to do with as he pleases. That is why there are laws to prevent that sort of thing, and that is why we see some justification in what Hud is doing.

Before Hud is able to get guardianship of the property, Homer falls off his horse and is mortally injured. Lonnie tries to reassure him that he’ll be all right, but Homer says he wants to give up:  “Hud there’s waiting on me. And he ain’t a patient man.”  Right after saying that, he dies.

Therefore, like the attempted rape, the guardianship is only attempted as well. Our attitude toward Hud might have been different had he actually succeeded in getting possession of the ranch and putting his father out to pasture.

In the novel, Lonnie goes to get help, and while he is gone, Hud shoots Homer, saying he did it to put him out of his misery.  That would also have been too much for us had that scene been in the movie. As noted above, we no longer want to identify with a psychopath in a movie once he kills somebody.

And so it is that the movie softens the character that is in the book, and in so doing, allows us to interpret his behavior sympathetically, even if we have misgivings as we do so.

As noted earlier, I have not read the book.  I didn’t see anything in the summaries about Hud’s having been drafted.  In the movie, however, as Lonnie prepares to leave the ranch for good after Homer’s funeral, Hud says to him that he is a “little bit green” to be going off on his own:  “I was about your age when I went in the Army. Your granddaddy bought me a Mars candy bar at the station, and said, ‘Character’s the only thing I got to give you. Be a man.’”

Lonnie replies, “Well, I guess he was kind of worried, your trying so hard to get out of the draft.”

I did not see this movie when it first came out in 1963.  When I did finally see it at the drive-in with some friends of mine in 1968, we all laughed in a grim sort of way.  Our college deferments were just about up, and we were all trying to figure out some way to dodge the draft.  So, while Lonnie’s remark was supposed to indicate one more way in which Hud was a shameless character, by 1968, dodging the draft had acquired an entirely different connotation.

More to the point, given that this movie wants to portray Hud as an unscrupulous character, wouldn’t it have been better to have him succeed in dodging the draft? Or would that be like the attempted rape of Alma and Hud’s attempt at guardianship?  That is, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to rape her, whereas we would not have done so had he succeeded; and we find it easier to accept what Hud was doing about trying to get possession of the ranch when Homer’s death makes that unnecessary.  By the same token, then, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to dodge the draft, whereas we might not have done so had he succeeded in that case either.

That old movies should frown on draft dodgers is not surprising.  In For Me and My Gal (1942), Gene Kelly deliberately breaks his hand to avoid being drafted but ends up redeeming himself heroically. In Mr. Lucky (1943), the title character played by Cary Grant dodges the draft, but ends up having a change of heart and decides to do what he can for the war effort.

With the advent of the Vietnam War, attitudes about the draft changed for a lot of people.  In fact, one thing good about that war was that you could dodge the draft without shame.  After I pulled it off, everyone was happy for me:  my college professors, my friends, my parents.  In fact, even the sergeant at the draft board, after reading the doctor’s recommendation, said to me with a big smile on his face, “Congratulations, you just got yourself a I-Y deferment.”

Going beyond that, I knew a girl who said she would never have sex with a man who had been in the Army, indicating that a man should have the moral courage to refuse to serve.  In Hamburger Hill (1987), a soldier gets a Dear John letter from his sweetheart, breaking up with him, because her college friends have persuaded her that it is immoral to have a boyfriend who is a soldier.  There are also remarks in that movie about girls back home “fucking for peace.”  We’d come a long way since D.H. Lawrence, when asked why men go to war, replied, “Because the women are watching.”

And yet, these changes in attitude notwithstanding, I have never seen a movie in which someone dodged the draft and then went on to live happily ever after, unless he first redeemed himself in some way.

The draft was ended in 1973, so we can only speculate as to what our attitude toward a draft dodger would be today.