The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Say, what gives?

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal to the teenager on your sofa about the teenager you once were? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

On December 1 1958, inventor and rube Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) arrives in New York. He finds a job in the mail room of Hudsucker Industries, then — as part of a plot by Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) to depress Hudsucker stock — is almost immediately promoted to President. But Norville’s invention (the Hula Hoop) becomes an overnight success, upsetting Mussburger’s plans. Meanwhile, investigative journalist Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is trying to find out what’s going on at Hudsucker. Luckily, it’s the season for miracles, and everything is all cleared up at the stroke of midnight on December 31.

The Hudsucker Proxy isn’t the most obvious Coen Brothers film to show the kids. You might prefer to start with a bona fide classic like Fargo (1996), or one of the larky ones like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). But it’s December, and The Hudsucker Proxy is a Christmas movie. More specifically, it’s a seasonal movie that parodies and celebrates other classic seasonal movies, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to The Apartment (1960), taking in Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges on the way.

It was a big commercial flop. The Coens had had a string of critical successes with their first few films, culminating with three awards at the Cannes Film Festival for Barton Fink (1991). Following this, the echt Hollywood producer Joel Silver — the man responsible for Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Predator — decided to bankroll their next movie. They ended up with a production budget of something like $25 million, almost three times the budget of Barton Fink.

Quite what Silver thought he was getting for his money is anyone’s guess. What he actually got was a movie that manages to be simultaneously baggy and hectic. It is full of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and exemplary visual storytelling, as in the bravura Hula Hoop sequence. It has all the Coens’ customary quirkiness and eclectic references. The story takes in stock fixing, mismatched romance and the invention of the bendy straw. It blends ‘40s magic realism with ‘50s corporate cynicism; the whimsy of Frank Capra with the fast-talking of His Girl Friday (1940); breathtaking, vertiginous deco production design with weird, comedic Gene-Kelly-style dream sequences. As Silver said to cinematographer Roger Deakins after watching the dailies: ‘What the fuck is this?’ (Or, as characters in the film remark every time there’s a ridiculous plot twist: ‘Hey, what gives?’)

The public sentiment was similar, and the film was a commercial disaster. (It was not helped by the direct comparison with the uber-successful and astonishingly cheap Four Weddings and a Funeral, released in the same year.) It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if the Coens had followed a similar trajectory to their old friend and collaborator Sam Raimi, who directed The Evil Dead (1981), helped write the script for Hudsucker, and directed that wonderful Hula Hoop sequence. In 2002 Raimi went mainstream with the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie. In a world where Hudsucker had been a vast success, might the Coens now be directing Doctor Strange movies for Marvel? Could we have had John Goodman as The Ancient One instead of Tilda Swinton? Steve Buscemi as Dread Dormammu of the Dark Dimension?

But in truth, this could never have happened. The Hudsucker Proxy was the movie the Coens had wanted to make; they had been planning for it and tinkering with it for years. This was their dream, and their dreams were and are not those of the American public. The Coens responded by returning to low budget indie production and making what is arguably their masterpiece: Fargo.

Delights

If it’s any consolation to Joel Silver, you can see where his money went. It’s there in the casting of genuine movie stars, most notably Paul Newman, who turns in a typically splendid performance as the cigar-chomping mogul Sidney Mussburger. Tim Robbins is perfect as a giant, goofy, genial idiot, and Jennifer Jason Leigh has honed her Rosalind Russell impression to a cutting edge.

As you would expect from the Coens, the film is also full of delightful character actors, including John Mahoney as a perfectly irascible newspaper editor, Bill Cobbs as a possibly magical timekeeper, and an absolutely unrecognisable Jim True-Frost as a manic elevator operator, a world away from his hapless Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski in The Wire.

The budget was also spent on a stunning model of mid-century Manhattan, all Atom Age skyscrapers and deco streamlining. Indeed, the model was so stunning that it has since been used in many other films, including The Shadow (1994) and Batman Forever (1995), two of the superhero movies the Coens might have ended up making in our parallel universe. (Warner Brothers sold the model to Universal for The Shadow, only to find that they needed to hire it back to make Batman Forever. This is exactly the kind of over-complicated financial footwork The Hudsucker Proxy satirises.) This re-use seems like the perfect metaphor for the movie’s ‘quotation generation’ re-appropriation of Golden Age Hollywood movies. It conjures the effect of seasonal channel surfing, creating an ideal gestalt of mid-century Christmas movies.

It also, naturally, has a terrific script, melding an accurate approximation of screwball cross-talk with an affectionate parody of period movie tropes, and adding the Coens’ usual relish for language and weakness for delightfully terrible jokes.

Disappointments

Of course, if you didn’t spend your childhood Christmases flicking through TV channels that were showing Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), and bingeing on Wilder and Hawks, then a lot of this is going to leave you cold.

The film also showcases the Coens’ perpetual reluctance to settle on a clear theme or tone. Their Gen X fans appreciate their penchant for splicing together wildly different approaches and sliding gleefully across genres, as if the canonical guidelines weren’t there. (Which, of course, they’re not.) The Coens’ eclectic approach makes sense to those of us whom Bob in Drugstore Cowboy (1989) calls ‘the TV babies’; raised in a saturated media environment, culturally omnivorous, endlessly curious. They are also insistent on leaving their films as texts to be interpreted, shy of providing any definitive meaning or argument. The audience can read them how they like, which is catnip to some (present!) but anathema to many.

You know, for kids!

So, can you show it to the kids? We showed it to a kid last Christmas; he was very taken with it, and immediately started trying to puzzle it out. This is partly because he is a child of a Metropolitan Editor, but it’s also because he and his brother were Coen Brothers fans already, having discovered for themselves The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). So, yes, you can show it to the kids, even the ones who have never heard of Preston Sturges. Which is pretty much all of them, I’m going to bet.

Is it still worth it?

Definitely. Not least because — given the sackfuls of substandard seasonal slop that get sicked onto the streaming channels every December — we need all the good Christmas movies we can get.

But it’s also worth it if you like reading too much into things, which we, evidently, do. This time, for instance, I was particularly struck by the recurrent symbols of circles, orbits and cycles. They’re hardly subtle, as in Norville’s famously idiotic sketch of a Hula Hoop; but I hadn’t quite noticed how deeply they permeate the script with ideas of rebirth, reinvention and eternal return. It’s tempting to see this theme as being an echo of the endless reruns of Christmas movies (re-runs that turned It’s A Wonderful Life from a flop into a classic).

But it’s also — obviously — about time, most clearly in the big Hudsucker building clock, the mechanism of which powers the climax of the film. This is another interpretation of one of the echt Christmas-movie plots: how should you spend your precious few orbits round the sun? Is your life on the right path, or will the equinoctial rebirth prompt a rebirth of your own heart, like Scrooge, and George Bailey, and C. C. Baxter?

The Hula Hoop was actually invented by the splendidly named Wham-O corporation, which was also first to market the Frisbee, Silly String and the Hacky Sack. Founded in 1948, Wham-O took the technological advances of the post-War military industrial complex, plastics and mass production, and turned them to frivolous jollity and pointless pastimes.

Their inventions are the perfect instruments for Norville Barnes, a man of glee and energy in the grey, reptilian world of Hudsucker Industries. Like It’s A Wonderful Life, the film seems to be asking: are you a Sidney J. Mussburger, a Mr Potter, sitting on a horde of gold like a dyspeptic dragon? Or are you a Norville, bringing joy to the world? A George Bailey, surrounded by friends? Do you want to be Joel Silver, churning out mindless multiplex filler, or the Coen Brothers, making mad little entertainments for mad little people?

At the end of the movie the universe (in the shape of Moses the janitor and the ghost of Waring Hudsucker) intervenes to set everything to rights. This is pure fantasy; just, you know, for kids. And this movie is set at Christmas, a time that is famously, you know, for kids. But if you can’t think optimistic thoughts at Christmas; if you can’t hope it’ll turn out alright in the end; if you can’t dream, like the Coen Brothers… when can you?

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If you want to know how much I like The Hudsucker Proxy, try counting all the references to it in my Christmas story The Elf Service:

The Elf Service, Episode 1