If Hollywood was turning some pedigreed book into a movie, Newman would now get the star role: in Faulkner’s The Long, Hot Summer, John O’Hara’s From the Terrace, Leon Uris’s Exodus. Tevis’s novel wasn’t in that exalted category, but it made a better movie, in part because it cast Newman as the hero-heel who’s a pleasure to watch in action, right up to the climactic comeuppance. His Fast Eddie Felson is a pool hustler, coming into some joint, pretending to be an average player and then, when some real money is put on the table, crushing the opponent with his remorseless skill. He has talent, no question; but what the smart guys, like Minnesota Fats (Gleason), think Eddie lacks is character — that he’s “a born loser.”
The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing the curled lip of contempt, which Eddie flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his. Yet what audiences took away from the exercise, as nearly always with a Newman role, was the need to see more of the character. They did, 25 years later, when Martin Scorsese directed Newman and Tom Cruise in The Color of Money, based on Tevis’s sequel novel. Newman’s older, wiser, not quite so Fast Eddie earned the actor his only competitive Oscar.
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.
