“Paul Newman in Hud...characterized the modern western hero as disoriented and anachronistic, persisting, despite the decay of ranch life,...with a futile rebellion. Hud, one of the sixties' most important films and a top box-office success, explores movingly, in a terse Irving Ravetch/Harriet Frank, Jr. script, the dissolution of the Texas cattle empires and the collapse of cowboy traditions in the face of changing industrial and social conditions. Melvyn Douglas came out of retirement to create a memorable portrait of quiet indomitability as the old rancher, but it is Newman's Hud, drunken, wenching heir to the range; his nephew Brandon de Wilde, initially admiring but later disillusioned by his hero's corruption and cruelty; and the arrogant sexuality of Patricia Neal as the housekeeper he lusts after but cannot possess, who control the film, supported by James Wong Howe's relentlessly realistic exterior photography that bleeds the sky of character, exposing the film's characters like microbes on the sterile slide of the bleached plain.” John Baxter, Hollywood in the Sixties