The western genre is essential in the creation of American mythmaking. Through decades of cinema, the western positioned America is something extraordinary, a place where good triumphs over evil, where families can thrive, and where good old fashioned masculine bravado can solve just about anything.
Martin Ritt’s 1963 masterpiece Hud comes at a time in American filmmaking when the western was at its end. Compared to the dominance of westerns in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the genre had all but disappeared by the ‘60s. Hud is a very different kind of western: instead of building the myth of a spectacular America, it tears that myth apart. Hud is a movie about how difficult it is to be human, a common theme that runs through Ritt’s work.
