I recently saw Hud,
the 1963 film featuring Paul Newman as the fun-loving and frequently drunk nephew of Melvyn Douglas, the old man who is faced with ruin when one of his herd is found dead from what is determined eventually to be from foot and mouth disease, which is highly contagious and presumably has affected the rest of the herd by now.
So the state comes in and has to snuff his whole herd. Their housekeeper, Patricia Neal is pretty disgusted with men as a back story and refuses Newman’s advances including, finally, attempted rape, then, after the old man falls off his horse one evening and dies, she decamps on a bus to somewhere, anywhere but there. You don’t blame her. The old man doesn’t like Hud, but the most one is able to get out of the old man is that Hud just never gave a damn. About what we never learn. I guess it was bad enough that Hud’s response to the death of a heifer from what eventuates as “foot and mouth disease” was a public-spirited desire to just sell the herd before the state authorities find out.
The cinematography is gorgeous even in Black and White thanks to James Wong Howe who won an academy award for it.
The desolate beauty of West Texas is evident. The mass killing of the cattle in a ready made pit made with bulldozers was reminiscent of those of the Polish officers at Katyn forest or the Jews in any number of instances during the second world war, but maybe that is just me.
After the disaster of having his entire herd put to
death, the old man refuses the financial expedient of allowing oil and
gas exploration on his land basically because he loved the cattle
business and for some reason both oil and gas exploration and raising
cattle are not compatible. The old man shows signs of failing health so
Hud sees a lawyer about having the old man declared mentally
incompetent, so that Hud gets control of his lands. Hud’s
impressionable nephew turns away in disgust and leaves the premises
carrying a valise. Hud goes and has a bud in the empty house.
Bertolucci's films are not chick flicks, and don't expect to get any action afterwards unless your date has strange proclivities. If anything you and your date will both be too exhausted and wrung out, if not contemplating suicide.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 is an epic and very long film (315 minutes) about two Italian boys: one rich and the other poor. They were born on the same day in 1900: one the grandson of the rich Padrone landowner (Alfredo, played by Robert de Niro) and the other the bastard son of peasants (Olmo, played by Gerard Depardieu).
Right off the bat it becomes clear that there is nothing good that comes out of a rich guy’s household or his family. It is bad enough that the Padrones on the estates are mean spirited and miserly, but they are prone to suicide when they get too old to do it any more. In one memorable early scene Burt Lancaster as the old Padrone, behaving strangely, wanders into the cow barn with a young peasant girl in his employ and she is made to milk one of the cows while the Padrone takes off his shoes and lets the cow manure squish between his toes. Then he tells her to go tell the farm workers, who are out dancing that he is dead, and hangs himself. Later the son, the new Padrone, who wears a fur coat all the time, has his Dad cut down and pretends that he was on his deathbed and dictating a last will and testament. I guess he wanted to make sure that his father's estate would be properly disposed of.
The rich boy and grandson (Robert DeNiro) is good natured but weak. He makes a bad marriage to a woman of unstable sanity who promptly surrenders to drugs and alcohol. He is nevertheless a friend of Olmo, who is a peasant bastard and a dedicated Communist. As young men Olmo and Alfredo go to patronize a whore who does a dual hand job on both of them and then has an epileptic fit. He then marries a girl whose idea of fun is to feign blindness in bars and rides a white horse named Cocaine. This animal is presented to the happy couple as a wedding gift during the reception by a drug dealing older friend. .
Meanwhile Attila, who is by now a blackshirt and cat killing overseer on the Padrone's estate has married Alfredo's sister, who
herself could stand in for the wicked witch in a production of the Wizard of Oz. Attila (played by Donald Sutherland) is cruel and evil in the extreme. He schemes to get the property of another landowner by trickery and then murders the former owner's wife, and when he comes upon a hapless boy who finds Attila and wife in a bedroom, he buggers the boy and then bashes his brains out. He later accuses Olmo of the crime since he was not at the wedding. Olmo thereupon gets beaten nearly to death by his gang of Blackshirt thugs. Attila is a fine piece of work. Bug-eyed and ugly, he is so mean he kills a cat by bashing him with his head, as an illustration of how his gang of blackshirts should deal with communists. Later, when Olmo and the other peasants cover Attila with horseshit for being such an asshole, Olmo has to flee his home. Indeed they tickle the ani of their livestock so that they can get fresh ammunition. The blackshirts come and bust up his household and Attila shoots a couple of old ladies in the rain. Somewhere in there they butcher a live pig and cut it into pork chops.
All the poor people are communists and sing the internationale lustily when they have the chance. When the war ends and the fascists and the Germans are finally driven from Italy, the peasants know it is payback time, especially for Attila and his wife. Eventually Attila gets shot in the head by a people’s justice committee, but when they show up to deal with the latest Padrone, who is now Alfredo, who sympathized with the poor but never did much for them, he is saved by Olmo.
The peasants, are furious but curiously submissive. They have all the weapons they need to go on a bloody rampage, but when a postwar committee of uniformed policemen show up to announce the peace agreement between all parties they turn in their weapons and accede to the wishes of the partisans. So the Padrone survives and things go on as before, somehow. .
The camera zooms out of this scene while the figures of Olmo and Alfredo are wrestling with each other and the communists peasants take their huge red banner into the fields. Perhaps it is all heavy symbolism of a type. Like much in this film it does not make sense, or perhaps I have missed the point.
Years later there are Olmo and Alfredo still cuffing one another but much older. Alfredo and Olmo return to the railroad tracks where as boys Olmo showed Alfredo a stunt whereby he lies down between the tracks and covers his eyes while a train rolls over him. Only this time Alfredo, following on the tradition of his grandfather, lies down across the tracks and commits suicide. End of story.
Basically Bertolucci's 1900 is a heavy handed communist fairy tale. Never mind that the simple minded folk who are so much in favor of state socialism would have gotten ungentle treatment from other Marxist inspired uniformed thugs if it had ever come about in Italy. The rich are by nature greedy, dissolute, and mean, and the poor are hard-working and have a blind faith in either Mary or Marx, and remain the losers in a world that is manifestly unfair.
