43: Hudsucker DNA Part 3: Odds And Ends
An excellent summation of the films that influenced The Hudsucker Proxy’s creation is that it has a Frank Capra plot but with characters and dialogue by Preston Sturges. Capra and Surges are clearly the film’s most obvious antecedents, but there are a few important odds and ends that cannot be ignored if one is to be a completionist about such things, and what is this very project if not completionist. This week’s essay is more of a composite of three mini-essays on Hudsucker’s minor influences that are important enough to be notable, but not important enough to warrant individual essays on their own.
Executive Suite
Sometimes there exists art that takes itself so seriously that it simply begs to be spoofed. In the 16th century, chivalric novels espousing the great deeds of knights of the past centuries were the literary fad of Europe. They were popular, they were ubiquitous, and most were terribly written but terribly serious. One of these such writers was Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, whose best known work in his lifetime was Adamis de Gaula*. As the 16th century drew to a close, a Castillian tax collector read Adamis de Gaula, and found it to be the most insipid and stupid thing he’d ever read. He imagined what it would be like if a poor deluded soul actually took what Montalvo was writing seriously, and those imaginings became the basis of a novel of his own: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, one of the greatest novels ever written.
In the world of film, there are two very notable examples of the same phenomenon: art so serious and yet ridiculous that mockery of them produced masterpieces. One is the novel Red Alert, a book about a nearly averted nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union published in 1958. The book is the story of a paranoid air force general who launches an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by duping his squadron into believing that the Soviets have already bombed the US. If the story sounds familiar, it is because it is the basis for the film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Stanley Kubrick found the ideas and plotting of the ostensibly-serious Red Alert to be so plodding as to be comical, and so he decided to adapt it into a film as a dark comedy. He took the same characters and plot points of Red Alert and tweaked the dialogue slightly to make it more obviously absurd and cast comic actors like Peter Sellers and Slim Pickins in the “serious” roles, ultimately producing one of the greatest pieces of art about cold-war era paranoia ever made.
The other acknowledged masterpiece made this way comes from the 1957 film Zero Hour! a thriller about a former fighter pilot named Stryker with PTSD who follows his wife onto a cross country flight in a desperate attempt to save their relationship. Once onboard though, it turns out one of the in-flight meal options (the fish) has been tainted, and anyone who eats it, including the pilot and copilot, end up too sick to function causing Stryker to buck up and land the plane. Once again, if this plot sounds familiar, that is because it is the basis for the 1980 comedy Airplane! David and Jerry Zucker had seen Zero Hour! and found its dialogue and plotting to be self-serious to the point of comedic absurdity. Airplane! did not rewrite Zero Hour! as a comedy; it simply reframed it: casting dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen and having them deliver many of the very same lines of dialogue that were in Zero Hour! By simply placing the plot and dialogue of Zero Hour! into a film where there’s jars of Hellman’s Mayonnaise all over the Mayo Clinic and where the main character requests a smoking ticket only to be handed a piece of paper with smoke billowing from it, the inherent comedy of its over-serious tone becomes apparent and thus a comic masterpiece is born.
Hudsucker is an underrated film, but even I must acknowledge that it is no Dr. Strangelove or Airplane!. Still, it borrows one aspect of these films, in that it borrows plot points from a film so self-serious and plodding that any honest interpretation of it cannot help but result in a comedic take being applied. Hudsucker’s serious antecedent is the 1954 drama Executive Suite. Executive Suite’s plot revolves around a fictitious furniture company, whose President unexpectedly drops dead of a heart attack on the street. The film’s fictitious Treadway Corporation enters into a state of chaos, with its executive board having no clear direction as to who should helm the company after its president’s death. One of the more conniving board members endeavors to use his own advance knowledge of the president’s death in an insider trading stock short scheme. The ultimate showdown of who should run the company comes down to a standoff between the greedy company controller Loren Shaw, who cares nothing for furniture manufacture and only has eyes for charts and data, and VP of Design and Development Don Walling, who ultimately wins over the undecided board members via a stirring speech about how he doesn’t care about facts and figures and where one line meets another on a graph, but instead he cares about building a quality product to be delivered for a fair price.
unfortunately Walling doesn’t pitch this table to the board with a drawing of a square and saying “you know, for putting things on”
The movie is not good, but it’s not good in the exact same way that Adamis De Gaula, Red Alert, and Zero Hour! are. Its over-the-top assertions of company by-laws and stock swindles as being life-and-death matters are cartoonish and absurd. One can see the beginnings of Sidney Musburger in Loren Shaw: the man who cares nothing for human life or the perceived good that a large corporation can deliver but only cares for whether he has control and where the numbers lie. One can see the beginnings of Norville Barnes in Don Walling: a wide eyed youth who earnestly hopes to create something that the American public will genuinely love and want to buy from him. One can certainly see the beginnings of Waring Hudsucker in Avery Bullard: the president of the large manufacturing firm whose character looms large over the entire action of the film despite dying early into its first act. One can easily imagine a the trio of Sam Raimi, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen living in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and catching an afternoon airing of Executive Suite on TV and saying “you know, this could be hilarious if it were funny” and getting to work on the script for Hudsucker.
*Montalvo’s lasting legacy is not this work however; it is the fact that he accidentally named the state of California. He once wrote a novel called Las sergas de Esplandián partially set on a fictitious island off the western coast of North America called “California” as it was ruled by a female caliph named Califa. When Spanish explorers sailed westward from the northwestern coast of what is now the Mexican state of Sinaloa, they discovered what they thought was a large island and gave it the name of the island from the book they had read. The name stuck even after the island they’d discovered turned out to be a peninsula. Imagine a scientist today discovering a technically habitable planet that is covered in sand and deciding to name it “Arrakis” or “Tattooine”, and then having that name survive even as the art of Frank Herbert or George Lucas disappears into obscurity.
The Sweet Smell of Success
Through the 1930s a Jewish playwright from the Bronx wrote several plays for a new acting troupe called The Group Theatre. His plays were unapologetically focussed on his fellow New York City working class Jews. He was celebrated as a hero of the working man in the press, and his critical success caused Hollywood to take notice. He was promised gobs of cash for his efforts if he would write for the pictures and figured he would be able to use the extra money to subsidize his theater of the working man back in New York. He didn’t take to Hollywood however, and despite being put under contract he never had a writing credit on any film for years.
This is of course the plot of the Coen Brothers film Barton Fink, but it’s also the real life story of the playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets. Odets never befriended William Faulkner and was never a neighbor to a serial killer played by John Goodman as far as any historical record is concerned, but his lack of film credits despite decades in California is established fact. He worked on many scripts, declining credit for many of them (including allegedly taking a pass at Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life), but after more than twenty years in tinseltown he turned in exactly two screenplays that were turned into films with his name as a credit: 1946’s Deadline at Dawn and 1957’s The Sweet Smell of Success.
The Sweet Smell of Success is a scathing indictment of celebrity and gossip journalism that is anchored by a masterful performance by Burt Lancaster as a barely fictionalized version of New York gossip mogul Walter Winchell. Lancaster portrays the gossip mogul as a calm and collected villain. He is clearly a malevolent force, but he does so without any evil cackles or wringing hands. Lancaster is evil, but he’s also kind of cool in the film, and bears a not-insignificant similarity to Paul Newman as Sidney Mussburger.
While there is some influence on Musburger’s character in Lancaster’s performance, the greatest influence on The Hudsucker Proxy from The Sweet Smell of Success comes simply from Lancaster’s character’s name: J.J. Huntsecker, clearly the inspiration for the name of Hudsucker’s titular Hudsucker*.
In terms of their range of filmmaking, Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy represent polar opposites in terms of the kinds of films the Coens make, but one strange character name binds them together unexpectedly. Well, that and the presence of a Steve Buscemi cameo.
* Musburger’s own silly and unusual name continues to be a bit of a mystery. The best I can come up with is that it might be a take on the Columbia University Philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. Morgenbesser was a colorful character in New York Academia of the latter half of the 20th century. He once famously was arrested for lighting up his pipe on the stairs coming out of the subway. A police officer told him to cut it out, telling Morgenbesser that if he let him get away with it he’d need to let everyone do it, to which Morgenbesser replied “what are you, Kant?” He was released only after patiently explaining to the NYPD the concept of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and that he was not in fact calling the officer a rude name for where babies come from. As a fellow New Yorker, a fan of colorful characters, and a former philosophy student, it’s entirely possible that Ethan Coen was familiar with Morgenbesser and his antics and thus named the conniving villain in Hudsucker in his honor.
His Girl Friday
The logline used regularly by Joel & Ethan Coen while describing their upcoming big-budget feature made with Joel Silver’s money was that it was “set in a big building and has characters who talk fast and wear sharp clothes”. One of the main characters of the film is a lady journalist, and the film is clearly a pastiche of screwball comedies of Hollywood’s studio system days. One simply cannot put all those things together and not think about the Howard Hawks directed studio system screwball comedy about a lady journalist who talks fast and wears sharp clothes: His Girl Friday.
His Girl Friday has nothing in common with Hudsucker plot wise beyond the presence of a lady journalist who talks fast and wears sharp clothes. The scoop Friday’s Hildy Johnson is covering concerns an unjust execution of a prisoner and his subsequent escape from that prison. The scoop Hudsucker’s Amy Archer is covering is one of stock malfeasance and corporate intrigue. The newsrooms are different, their coworkers are different, the two women’s love interests are different and the way they use their journalist horse sense to do justice to the world is different, but to say that they have but one similarity and therefore are mostly dissimilar is like saying that aside from being right wing strongmen Mussolini and Hitler had nothing in common and therefore their regimes were mostly dissimilar. The deep ties of similarity of that one thing completely tie the two things together. Amy Archer is clearly written in a way that almost makes her Hildy Johnson fanfiction with the name swapped out. Both are incredibly quick witted women who talk a mile a minute. Both are consummate professionals who are both incredibly skilled at their jobs and are incredibly passionate about them. In Hildy’s case once she realizes what a big story she’s in the middle of and how much of an exclusive she has over the competition she sinks her teeth into the story and nothing, not the state government, a man with a gun on her, or her poor fiancé being stuck in the county jail can tear her away from it. Amy in the meantime doesn’t even need convincing to go after the story of Hudsucker Industries’ “Idea Man”, opting to barge in on a staff meeting she wasn’t invited to and putting herself on the case. Both women also feel at home in male-dominated fields. While Amy develops a bit of self-consciousness about the over-familiarity of her male colleagues and Hildy longs for a “normal” life of raising children and having a home and a vacation, neither are fundamentally changed by the end of the film. They’re both too good at and too engrossed by journalism and the weirdos surrounding it to do anything else. Both of course also have verbal scrapping partners in their newsrooms who are equally smartly dressed who have strong chins and are excellent at mugging to the camera. The nature of their respective relationships are different but Friday’s Walter Burns and Hudsucker’s Smitty almost exist primarily at the only person quick witted enough to match the respective women beat for beat on their lightning fast communication. One can easily see a world in which Norville Barnes never entered the picture and Amy and Smitty get married, only to quickly divorce once she realizes there’s no curing how much of an incurable heel he is, as is the setup to Friday’s Walter and Hildy.
Oh, and they also both type incredibly quickly in ways that no human being actually types.