Hud is a classic Greek tragedy

No responses to this in 3 years!!! I just watched this for the second time and thought the same thought. It is simple, pared down characters and their relationships with each other...just like a Greek tragedy! (Loved this film, by the way).

It's like a Greek tragedy in the way the father character is to blame for the faults of his son. The 'tragic flaw' passed down from father to son. People always talk about Hud being such a bastard, as though that's all there is to it, that's just the way he is. It's much more interesting to consider how he turned out that way. In simple terms, Hud's father never made him feel loved and it's implied that Hud blames his father for the death of his mother.

If you read the McMurty novel, some of this is more explicit as I recall. And by the way, the novel is VERY different is a few ways. After reading it, I felt the film is an improvement over it.

No, I don't think "Hud" is a good example of a tragedy at all.

For a good example of a "classic" tragedy crafted by Larry McMurtry, I'd take "Brokeback Mountain," which has a much tighter adherence to the tragic principles, even though it doesn't have any of the Aristotelian unities: THERE, you have a protragonist with a tragic flaw: a young man who is unable to give himself, bestow himself, upon those he loves, and, as a result of his fear of loving bravely, destroys the happiness of everyone he cares about, and even drives the person he loves most in the world away to a gruesome and lonely death. He has a catharsis, and learns to reform, too late for happiness, but ends by swearing to his beloved's memory that he will know longer keep himself from those who love him.

By contrast, the protagonist in "Hud," although a flawed character, doesn't really suffer for his mistake. Nor is he a proper tragic hero: Ennis Delmar is--he is an admirable man, trying desperately to strive to do the right thing, and is crushed by a chaotic universe in which he fears his own feelings of love, and cannot find satisfaction or pleasure--and cannot conquer the environment that destroys him.

Hud Bannon is not admirable at all: indeed, he is almost a COMIC hero, an animalistic creature enslaved by crude appetites, whom we are meant to despise from the beginning, and the only dramatic tension in the story is whether the youth, Lonnie, will, as his grandfather hopes, recognize that Hud is not a worthy model of manhood--which, indeed, Lonnie does come to recognize in time to free himself of the bad influence of his unprincipled uncle.

In the story, "Hud," the universe is the logical, orderly one of comedy, where the right things happen in the end: Lonnie realizes he must sever his relations with Hud and leaves; Alma recognizes that Hud's physical attractiveness cloaks a violent, assaultive, unfeeling nature, and flees; and the only sufferer in the film is old Homer Bannon.

Now, you COULD make a case for the story being a tragedy from Homer's standpoint: here he is, a decent man, cursed with a corrupt son, in spite of his deep virtue, just as, in spite of his hard work and good husbandry, his entire herd of carefully tended cattle is drooling with a foul disease that renders them a public danger that must be destroyed, and if the screenplay were more focused on Homer's decline and death in the face of the meaningless evil that makes his son "an unprincipled man" in spite of what must have been a very moral and righteous upbringing, and the equally random disease that destroys Homer's wealth, then I'd be more inclined to agree with your suggestion.

But I really don't think Homer is at the center of the drama: I think Hud himself is. Perhaps, originally, McMurtry conceived of this as a tragedy about a man who raised one evil son, whose carelessness led to the death of his only other child, and plagues his declining years in the midst of a financial catastrophe, and meant the movie to focus more on Homer as a tragic hero.

However, as it is, I'm more inclined to regard "Hud" as a Romance, structurally, rather than a tragedy. Perhaps I'll give you a tragic "sub-plot" for Homer...after all the imagery of the diseased cattle is certainly part of a tragic vision of the world, just like the torn body of the lamb in Brokeback Mountain, which Ennis encounters the day after he first embraces Jack in passion.

Absolutely! Shakespearean would apply also.