Since I closed out last week talking about the concept of "lesser" Scorsese, let's do the same with Joel and Ethan Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy, which, prior to Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers*, was considered their "lesser" film. Even in class this week I saw a fairly pronounced disdain for the film. Most of the other students were uncertain exactly what the Coens were trying to do with The Hudsucker Proxy, and considered their ode to Frank Capra to be "artificial" and "heartless." While The Hudsucker Proxy is certainly not my favorite of their films, I nevertheless disagree with their assessment, and will endeavor to make my case for the film.
First, the plot: Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a fresh faced college graduate from Muncie, Indiana, arrives in New York City in 1958, looking for work. Responding to an ad for Hudsucker Industries, Barnes ends up in the mailroom the same day that Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), President of the company, decides to dive out of the 44th floor window, leaving the company without a leader.
The Second-in-Command, Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) points out to the board that in the event of the death of Hudsucker, all of the stock will go public on January 1st, meaning they will lose control of the company. In order to buy up a controlling interest in the company, they need to make the stock prices plummet, so they decide to appoint some idiot to be the new company President. Norville, charged with bringing a "Blue Letter" from Hudsucker to Mussburger, arrives in Sidney's office just in time to make all the wrong impressions, and viola! New President. Unfortunately for Mussburger and the board, Barnes is less of an idiot than they hoped, and his one invention turns out to be the Hula Hoop.
Meanwhile, the Manhattan Argus, a struggling newspaper, is looking for a story. The Chief (John Mahoney) wants somebody to cover the Barnes story, but fast talking Pulitzer Prize winning Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has other ideas. She wants to expose him as a fraud, a theory she shares with her "heel" co-worker Smitty (Bruce Campbell). So, in true screwball fashion, she goes undercover and insinuates herself into Norville's world. From there, the story goes about how you'd expect it to, save for a clock-keeper that has some magical abilities and a ghostly visit from one Waring Hudsucker involving that "Blue Letter" that Norville never delivered...
The Hudsucker Proxy is very much in the spirit of a screwball comedy, although it takes place nearly a decade after Hollywood stopped making them. It is a strange film, in that it often alternates between the fast talking, Katharine Hepburn by way of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday world of Amy Archer to the slowly paced hayseed world of Norville Barnes. The result can feel a little disjointed, and admittedly it is hard to get into the film is you don't know exactly what you get into.
There are two things you should know heading into The Hudsucker Proxy:
1. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote The Hudsucker Proxy with Sam Raimi in 1981, and completed the script while Raimi directed 1985's Crimewave (also written by Joel and Ethan). This is not to imply that the scripts for either are somehow "less than" later works like Millers Crossing or Barton Fink, but rather to point out that while Sam Raimi made Crimewave (which flopped), the Coens were unable to find financing for Hudsucker for 9 years. When they did, Warner Brothers put uber-producer Joel Silver behind the picture and conceived of the film as a high-budget mass-appeal picture starring Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Paul Newman.
2. While the film is directly influenced by Frank Capra (particularly Mr. Deeds goes to Town), the films of Preston Sturges, and His Girl Friday - as well as visual references to Citizen Kane and Metropolis - it is important to note that The Hudsucker Proxy comes after movies like Executive Suite and the film version of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, which have already lampooned the Capra and Sturges films. Accordingly, what the Coen brothers are doing is necessarily less a direct parody and more of an amalgam of the original films and the subsequent dissections of the genre. In this way, plot elements like the clock (a literal deus ex machina) make slightly more sense.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's move on to my qualified defense of the film. The Cap'n is willing to admit that I don't regard The Hudsucker Proxy as highly as I do Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Millers Crossing, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man, or No Country for Old Men. But I do enjoy it. You have to be in a particular frame of mind in order to enjoy it, and I agree it's the hardest Coen brothers movie to watch without being steeped in film history. The Hudsucker Proxy is loaded with intertextual references that make enjoying the film on a surface level difficult.
That being said, I contend that there is a certain charm to the film. Leatherheads, a film very much like The Hudsucker Proxy in tone, is a film I enjoy for similar reasons, although I realize it's also universally derided. I was not bothered at all by Jennifer Jason Leigh's choice to mimic the rapid fire Howard Hawks-esque delivery of lines, or the corny earnestness of Tim Robbins as Norville Barnes. I really enjoy that the hokey ending is commented upon in the film (to the point of breaking the fourth wall, something the Coens would visit again in The Big Lebowski), and it has a certain charm if you enjoy How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (where I'd argue as much of the tone comes from over Mr. Deeds Goes to Town).
So yes, I suppose in this instance, you could argue that The Hudsucker Proxy is a "lesser" film of the Coen brothers, something I certainly contested in last week's Shutter Island review. That being said, the film has its merits and I'd say that cinephiles with a deep familiarity with screwball comedies and big business parody films can find something to enjoy. Otherwise, you might want to stick with the "better" Coen brothers films.
Until next time...
* I am actually all for calling The Ladykillers a "lesser" Coen brothers movie; upon recent inspection, the film simply does not work. However, I've detailed this elsewhere and will not spend more time and space dissecting their one and only official remake. As for Intolerable Cruelty, I honestly can't say I've watched it more than once but will, for the purposes of analysis, watch it again this summer in an effort to completely review the films of Joel and Ethan Coen.
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