An aerial tracking shot, flying the audience impossibly over a dreamy nighttime New York City, shows us a fantasy. We see the tall, imposing tower of Hudsucker Industries ahead, crowned with an impressive geometric-looking clock—setting the art deco-inspired palate of The Hudsucker Proxy. As we soar closer, we see Hudsucker Industries’ motto etched on the building’s facade: “The future is now.” We’re not in our future, though; this is New Year’s Eve, 1958.
Shortly after our twilight flight, we’re introduced to Waring Hudsucker himself (a magnificent Charles Durning); we watch him walk and then sprint the length of his very long conference table to the sound of his ticking watch (the future is now!) and then crash through the window. The camera swings around Hudsucker so that we see his face, his resignation and care, determined all the way down. We even see him try to shoo passersby out of his eventual sidewalk trajectory. It’s a strangely beautiful scene, almost serene, but before we can get too comfortable, the film shifts to a curt business discussion back in the boardroom and then—in a vertical move that has already come to define this film’s abrupt tempo—a sharp drop down to the bowels of the building: the smoking, clanking, clamorous mailroom where our naive young hero has just begun his ascent.
The scene gives us all the cues we need to know what we’re—pardon the pun—plunging into. We’re not just watching a film about the past, we’re watching a film that plunders the beats of the past. Joel and Ethan Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy boasts a stylized surrealism; performances are big and reality is more than a little off-kilter. The heightened sensibility, the exaggerated sets: they’re a signal that this is not going to be a movie with heart, it’s going to be a movie with moxie. It’s a film that feels meaningful as long as a love of film is meaningful to you.
The movie was not generally well-received, and even now you’ll find it at or near the bottom of most lists of Coen films. But I’ve loved The Hudsucker Proxy since I saw it in a theater opening night—watching Jennifer Jason Leigh perform a pitch-perfect hard-boiled reporter named Amy Archer, serving up a sucker of a story to her excitable editor (the always wonderful John Mahoney.) I knew even then that her performance—Hildy Johnson with a Katharine Hepburn accent—had nothing to do with naturalism.
What I watched took the great, frenetic pace of the zaniest of screwball comedies. Take the goofy plot: a conniving company director, Sidney J. Mussburger (the cigar-chomping Paul Newman, barking dialogue and spinning devilish plans with a callousness that would do Lionel Barrymore proud) convinces a mailroom rube just off the bus from Muncie, Norville Barnes (a delightfully naive Tim Robbins) to take over as president of Hudsucker Industries so the stock will plummet and the board can buy it all up cheap, but! The rube dreams up with a surprise hit – the Hula-Hoop – and the stock soars instead! I found it sly and subversive, and quoted it endlessly with my high school friends (theater people, all of us), so I was surprised to learn later that it had such a mediocre reputation.
Perhaps the Coens’ previous work, including Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple, just hadn’t prepared audiences for a film like this from a duo like that. (Though Raising Arizona is also a screwball comedy in its own way, it’s set firmly in the contemporary era and leans into character development in a way Hudsucker simply doesn’t bother with.) The Coen brothers are not shy about their love of movies: it shows up over and over again in their films, many of which are blatant homages to bygone genres. The Hudsucker Proxy is full of Golden Era references; the Coens clearly love these callbacks. In The Lady Eve, upright Charles and con artist Jean stand on the bow of a ship, and he awkwardly tells her he almost feels they could have known each other as children; in The Hudsucker Proxy, Robbins’ Norville tells Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Amy that they might have known each other in a past life in the woods, perhaps with Norville as an ibex and Amy as a gazelle. In another Preston Sturges gem, Christmas in July, Jimmy (a perfectly cast Dick Powell) enters a coffee slogan contest with an almost Dada-esquely terrible slogan: “Maxford House. If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee—it’s the bunk!” and wins after a prank is pulled on him. Similarly, Norville in Hudsucker dreams of… a plastic circle filled with sand, and the slogan, “You know, for kids!”
And the film practically bursts with these not-so-subtle nods: Norville clings to a clock a la Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923); the surreal cityscape at times mirrors the futurist heights and subterranean horrors of Metropolis (1927); the title winks at Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker character in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and a Frank Capra-esque theme weaves throughout the film, where an ordinary guy from the Midwest shows up in the big city with big ideas and vast optimism. This love of cinema also shows up in the careful production design—a visual feast of lines and curves that gestures at the Art Deco style of the ‘30s, packed with practical effects and models, including a massive model of downtown New York City, at an impressive 1/24th scale—and it also shows up in the way every actor embodies the energy of the film’s style. Everyone is committed to the screwball cadence, to the frantic energy their character brings to the picture, from Tim Robbins’s Muncie dunce to Paul Newman dominating a boardroom like Edward Arnold to Jennifer Jason Leigh throwing lines a mile a minute.
That The Hudsucker Proxy sits on the edge of the surreal knocks it away from the charges of carbon screwball copy. Time stops and starts, and interior space is odd, with cartoonishly enormous rooms and near-German expressionist angles. Forget humanism: the dead Hudsucker president shows up as an angel who’s a bit of a stickler. These moments of surrealism are a juxtaposition few directors but the Coen brothers could make, with their particular ability to place a scene with broad slapstick and zany humor in a slightly separate reality and somehow make it work.
Looking back at the reviews, the biggest criticism seemed to be that The Hudsucker Proxy was too much style and not enough substance—but I’d argue that the style is the substance here, which is the particular brilliance of the film. Many screwball comedies (prat)fall into the “style-as-substance” category. These are not romantic comedies, but rather screwball comedies—a genre that originally took the air out of romantic movies and subverted expectations, making them especially satisfying to watch. Bringing up Baby, Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve—many of these are more histrionics than heart. The style is the point, the genre conventions, the coloratura performances by leading ladies like Hepburn, Lombard, Russell, Stanwick, and now Leigh. You’re not meant to want to know them, you’re meant to want to watch them walk a tightrope, and laugh when they inevitably tumble.
In his essay on Twentieth Century for the Library of Congress, Michael Schlesinger writes of screwball comedies that “the situation itself would not become a ‘situation’ if everyone behaved like normal, mature people.” Which is not only a fantastic description of The Hudsucker Proxy, but also a very good description of many of the Coen brothers’ films—especially their purest comedies, like Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty (possibly the closest to true screwball comedy) and Burn after Reading. Screwball elements run through their films like runaway socialites: eccentric leads, unexpected reversals, physical comedy, chase sequences, false identities; best intentions go hilariously awry; hard-bitten cynics battle zany dreamers in matters of romance and will.
The Coen brothers intended for The Hudsucker Proxy to be their most commercial film to date. Instead it bombed at the box office, while hit films like Forrest Gump did nostalgia in broad, emotive strokes and corny but accessible callbacks. Yet how many filmgoers in 1994—the year that TCM first went on the air and Blockbuster dominated the industry, having already smothered many of the video rental stores that specialized in classic films—were familiar with a wide range of screwball references? There was certainly an audience for a seriously comic classic film homage, but it was just too strange, too specific, too much of a love letter.
There are so many moments, though, that offer pure movie-watching pleasure, distilled to an almost transcendent joy. Take the Hula-Hoop montage. We know, by this point in the film, what’s coming—of course the Hula-Hoop is going to sell like gangbusters. But the Coens do something smart here; they don’t simply show us kids buying Hula-Hoops. They feed us a series of visual gags: the price stickers, piling on; the round red hoop rolling solo down the street, navigating the sidewalks like a living thing; the overhead shot of the boy stepping into the center, the slow motion Hula-Hoop rolling on the hips, while the children look on in awe; the price stickers, coming off; the stock ticker tape, pooling on the floor. We’re laughing in delight at both how funny and rapid-fire it is; there’s a musicality, a rhythm to the scene that makes it a delight to follow the gags to their foregone conclusion. The Coens don’t tell, and they don’t show; they pull rabbit after rabbit out of a hat as we look on.
In the end, the most enchanting thing about The Hudsucker Proxy is its commitment to the bit. The Coens put all their cards on the table; they wholly invested in a created world that borrows from the past while bargaining on the future. It’s true that this film isn’t afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve, and in less-skilled hands, it would probably just be a charming and curious catalog, a reminder to go back and rewatch the best of the Capras and Sturgeses and Hawkses. But in the Coen brothers’ cutting room, The Hudsucker Proxy transcends its Golden Era beginnings and takes flight. And if we can forgo expectations for an hour and fifty minutes, it transports us, too.