The Hudsucker Proxy at 25

Written off as a grand folly, The Hudsucker Proxy is the priciest, silliest, sumptuousest (not a word, but what the heck), and, at times, most awe-inspiring dare in the Coen canon. Released twenty-five years ago today to a deafening silence at the US box office tills (I sat virtually alone in Graumans Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard that opening day), it cost a bomb (and delivered one) and was held up as the shining reason why the Coens would never crack Hollywood (not that they ever took a spoon to that particular curate’s egg). Nobody likes a smart-aleck, frowned the critics, and here were two alecks smarter than every critic in the land. Indeed The Hudsucker Proxy resolves into a form of living film criticism; a movie about what it is to be a movie.

Like all Coen works, it rewards repeated views, re-evaluation and study goddamnit. Hell, I would pay $25 million for Peter Gallagher’s lounge lizard crooner alone: bourbon in hand, bow tie loose, ladies swooning, microphone dangled like an offering, he’s Dean Martin headlining a ball prised loose from the pages of an Edith Wharton novel. Then this is a New York fairy tale aswirl with improbable connections. Archly contrived but honestly meant, it is, as Joel said, “a comment on the genre it draws from.”

You might call it the ballad of a stable of Hollywood greats (and Coen forefathers): Capra, Sturges, Lubitsch, Hawks, Wilder, Keaton, Chaplin, the whole gang of black-hearted minstrels whose magic glowed across the stalls. See also: Metropolis, Blade Runner,Sweet Smell of Success, His Girl Friday and a slew more.

The giggling, gurgling brothers are designated the godfathers of indie, but that charge doesn’t stick. Examine the evidence and you’ll find court jesters to the studio system, singing and dancing in their motley garb in praise Hollywood’s illustrious history: Blood Simple the noir, Raising Arizona the knockabout comedy, Miller’s Crossing the gangster flick, Barton Fink the horror (kinda) which unlocks their merry methods and sticky undercurrents. The Hudsucker Proxy was the next in a prearranged archeological dig through the wonders of American film. At heart, it’s a Capraesque fable jabbing a finger at the capitalist machinations of corporate America (as such, also a satire of the studio system that funded its creation). You know, for kids.

The skyscraper high concept had been stored away since 1984, when the brothers joined forces with housemate Sam Raimi on two scripts. The first, a crime caper titled The XYZ Murders, Raimi directed, falteringly, as Crimewave (1985). The other featured a clueless country boy who rises to the summit of a giant corporation (literally to the upper echelons of the monumental Hudsucker Building). A plot set on the cusp of 1959, but totters through stylistic eras like a numbskull with a waste bin stuck on his foot.

To recap: Norville Barnes (said numbskull, played by Tim Robbins, a goof’s goof), fresh in from Muncie, Indiana, is the dupe, the patsy, the proxy installed as chairman of the board on the sudden demise — via 44 floors (45 including the mezzanine) and one sidewalk — of Waring Hudsucker (the imperious Charles Durning). It’s a scheme, of course. A chance to send the stock into freefall as swift as the former chair, so the board (a battalion of geriatrics representing the crooked dominion of old money) can snaffle it up cheap. Orchestrating the scam is Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman, doing deep dish deadpan in a role offered to Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson), villain of the piece. Sniffing out the story of a lifetime is ace-reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose synthesis of fast-talking Hollywood dames is a wonder to behold: “Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about.”) who goes undercover as Barnes secretary, only to fall for the damn fool. There is a lot of falling.

Fate, irony and the conniving of Messrs. Joel and Ethan Coen will intervene when Barnes invents the hula hoop.

What possibly dissuaded audiences (who would rise at last from their sullen sofas for the chilly malfeasance of Fargo) was the veneer of artifice the Coens draped over their Christmas tree Manhattan. Artifice is the film’s very meaning: a postmodern joke about the two of them being labelled postmodernists. No other film displays the inventory of their gifts to such dazzling extent. No other film keeps the audience at such a remove. It is a pastiche that willingly admits to the pastiching. Now, if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?

Yet I return, more often I expect than most, to inhale again the sheer, meticulous beauty of all its fakery. The sparkling Manhattan that enfolds the story like Kane’s tumbling snow globe, built as a model through which the brothers could prowl like gods. The underworld of the mail room, that voluminous spin on Gilliam doing Orwell doing Kafka, run on arcane rules and rituals (“File a faulty complaint and they dock ya!”) like a microcosm of all Coen films. Talking of miniatures, how about that democratic vignette (a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon), a marvel of Coen visual dexterity and gift for montage (via second unit director Raimi), following the rise of Norville’s hula hoop dreams from abject failure to national sensation. There is so much here, delivered in such high style. The clattering board advertising new jobs; the shadow of the clock’s second hand sweeping across Mussburger’s office; Waring or Norville and the camera plunging down the storied flank of a skyscraper to the heart-stopping whoosh of forthcoming doom. If Raising Arizona was a horizontal comedy, The Hudsucker Proxy works on a vertical axis.

I have pondered the point before, but the Coens had been offered the chance to direct Batman before Tim Burton, turning it down fearing corporate schemes would inevitable stifle their whirligig muse. They would end up proxies. I like to think, The Hudsucker Proxy offers a glimpse into what a Coen Gotham might resemble. In short, a superhero jaunt far, far more far fetched than anything we have seen.

I return too for the vibrancy of its gamesmanship. The script is so ruthlessly clever. That feeling that there is more going than the Coens would ever admit to.

On the one hand, The Hudsucker Proxy is a film about the otherworldly enchantments of Golden Hollywood. The rank and file of studio pictures that collectively portray the world as a fairy tale, a dream, through which to whisper notions of better living to the great unwashed. On the other, it is another exploration into the meat of a made-up nation.

What is it that makes America tick? The pulse of the free market, quickening to the latest fad? The dreams or illusions of simple folk? The intellectual take of the fast talkers of the free press? Or something larger, more mysterious and movie-like — perhaps, say, the divine clockwork maintained in the Hudsucker loft? Good and evil lurk in the background of the tale, salt and pepper for the panoptic wiles of the Coen dish. Notably, Ethan is the one the degree in philosophy, supplying every gag (and every movie) with the loopy resonance of an enquiry into the mysteries of the big picture.

How can a film so bountiful be dismissed? In its disappointing wake, the crestfallen brothers turned to the spare realism of Fargo and have never been quite as emboldened again (Hail Caesar! comes closest). In that sense, The Hudsucker Proxy, wanton flop that it is, remains a jewell in an ironic crown. It’s the Coens at full throttle yet in complete command. A poetic indulgence, a glittering escapade (only these two would consider a tribute to Capra a surefire commercial gambit in 1994), a lavish folly. But the Coens showboating is a thing sure worth seeing. I’ll stake my Pulitzer on it!

Further reading:

The Coen Brothers: The Iconic Filmmakers and Their Work by Ian Nathan is out now

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coen-Brothers-iconic-filmmakers-their/dp/1781316848/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1552394160&sr=8-12&keywords=ian+nathan

For extended chat about The Ballad of Buster Scruggs:

A Boundless Will To Astound

For general ironic musings, notes from a book that never happened:

The Coencylopedia