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An appreciation of a true American icon...
Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies
Browse images: Appreciation Gallery
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more: Paul Newman passes away
Paul Newman's entrance in "Hud" (1963) is actually an exit, emerging just past dawn from a nondescript house on the side street of a no-name Texas town that barely has one street to begin with. He's the title character, of course, mid-30s, the lone surviving son of a local rancher, and he's been spending the wee hours with a married woman whose husband is about two minutes away from arriving home. Hud's nephew Lon (Brandon de Wilde) has been looking for him, found his big pink Cadillac brazenly parked in front of the house, and called him out.
So here comes Hud, snarling, tearing himself away from business left unfinished offscreen and lunging onto the small front porch. The shot is pretty straightforward but Hud's an insouciant angle: his body canted so that one side of him is advancing before the other, his spine still in the reluctant process of drawing itself erect, his left arm lifted in anticipation of leaning on the porch post between him and the camera. "This had better be good," he growls, into the lean now and letting his torso sag a little -- signaling that he's in charge here, but also allowing for the possibility, indeed the expectation, that maybe he can get out of whatever this is without raising a hand.
The sag and the lean ... nobody deployed these body-English parts of speech more eloquently than Paul Newman. See him in "The Hustler" (1961), his thumbs broken and his forearms in plaster casts, trying to button his own shirt, wordlessly rebuffing Piper Laurie's offer of help, then realizing he has no choice but to accept it.
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