Top 10 Paul Newman Films

1963; directed by Martin Ritt; screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., from the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry; with Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde.

The ladies in town love Hud Bannon (Newman), almost as much as he lusts for them. His younger brother (De Wilde) views him with the wary awe a budding meteorologist might invest in a Texas tornado. But their rancher father (Douglas) disapproves of Hud as a skunk, ready to sell diseased cattle before the bad word gets out. And the family housekeeper (Neal) — whose seen-it-all sexuality might make her Hud's female equivalent, if only Lone Star women in the early '60s had the same freedom as men — knows not to cuddle up to a viper. Now which side will the audience take toward this priapic nogoodnik? There's just one answer, and it rhymes with stud.

Except for Douglas's fuming, spuming work as a righteous-crank patriarch, this contemporary Western is a nearly perfect group portrait; the other three leads are at their best, and the movie doesn't prejudice itself against any of them. Since this is Newman's definitive inhabiting of the hero-heel, you might expect that a gelding awaits Hud in the final act. That it doesn't is not a validation of the character; rather it illustrates the sober lesson that a person like Hud learns nothing from his mistakes, and that other people will have to go on suffering for his.

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