The Signs and Symbols of Hud.

Patricia Neal in Hud, 1963.

        My mother knew the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal when they were children, though not well and only for brief periods of time. They both were born in coal mining towns in Whitley County Ky in the early 1920s. Neal was born in the small hamlet of Packard, a town which does not exist anymore, dried up with the Depression years. Neal moved to Knoxville, TN early in life, but visited relatives in KY every summer. My mother was born in the railroad town of Corbin. My mother's relatives were scattered through Whitley County in places like Rockholds and Redbird and Jellico Creek. The Whitley County families would, during the Depression years, collect together in these various places for two reasons, so that the children could help out with the summer farming for two weeks in each locale, and for the accompanying revivals hosted by the local Baptist churches. Here is where my mother knew Patsy Neal. Everyone knew Patsy Neal. My mother says that every time Patsy entered a room, even the chaotic slain-in-the-spirit country revival services, all the attention shifted to her, she was that charismatic. No one was surprised when she became a movie star.

    Neal portrays her rise through New York and Hollywood as an up-and-down rollercoaster of fame and scandal in her 1988 autobiography As I Am. After a more or less fallow period of movie-making in the late 1950s, she admits to the wonderful opportunity she had when offered the role of Alma, the housekeeper on the ranch in the film Hud, an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel about the harsh conditions of keeping a cattle ranch alive in the age of modernism and its angry-young-man manifestations that threaten to disrupt the concept of family. The film is a bleak, widescreen black-and-white. The characters are often lost within the framework of a harsh, wide-open space background. Neal's all-knowing stares betray her knowledge of the conflicts of the men who inhabit the house, lost in their petty arguments over control and morality in the face of a larger-than-life landscape of a bleak time and place.

    Hud will always signify to me the connection of my mother, a schoolteacher in the poverty-stricken area of coal-mining towns in southeast Kentucky and the greater world of fame and notoriety that was Hollywood in the mid twentieth century. This adds to the McMurtry-esque themes of how post-war American modernism with its suburban values and puritanically ethical expectations become, inevitably, at odds with the rough character formed by humans as America becomes more and more gentrified and the "frontier" values turn into myths that hold little reality.

    The images of Hud are both cosmic and personal to me, as they can be to everyone. Perhaps the brief acquaintance my mother had with the Oscar-winning actress in their childhood adds a bucolic touch with which most people would not identify. But everyone can identify with the changing world that loses day by day some aspect of the overwhelming grandeur of the larger landscape. Hud becomes a symbol of this change, no matter which direction the change occurs. We can all feel the diminishing of the lost world, complete with both grandeur and loneliness. The loss of this world, signified by images such as those in Hud,  create a further loneliness all their own as we watch the individuals battle to hold on to their dignity in the face of overwhelming circumstances.