Two things killed this movie at the box office when it was first released: first, its title. Americans didn't seem to know what a "proxy" was, much less a hudsucking one. The second was its time of release. The movie came out in May as an early summer release but was actually a movie that would have been better received at Christmas. "Jaws" is a prototypical summer film. "It's A Wonderful Life," by comparison, would hardly be a summer blockbuster but sets the perfect tone for the holiday season. Come back in twenty years and you will find that "The Hudsucker Proxy" IS the Frank Capra classic for a new generation. It is Capra meets "Metropolis" blended with the smart humor of the Coens. The casting is near perfect. Tim Robbins is the naive and goofy savant. Paul Newman is as wonderful a villain as you will find as the evil Sidney Mussberger. Only Jennifer Jason Leigh takes a bit of getting used to as the tough talking reporter but she will move you by movie's end. I've had to beg, plead, wheedle and cajole my friends through the years to watch this movie and not let themselves be turned off by its title. Thus far it's left no one disappointed.
Buy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) Now
The Hudsucker Proxy is one of my favorite movies of all time. I won't go over what's so great about it because you can get all that just as well by reading the other reviews on this page.I do want to address the quality of the DVD, however. While the DVD does offer both standard and widescreen mode (anamorphic, no less), it decidedly comes across as a sub-par job. The transfer is terrible, dark and grainy in places and completely washed-out in others (the dancing scene made me wonder if something was wrong with my player). The sound is in Dolby stereo rather than the 5.1 channel surround just about everything post-1990 is available in. Not to mention the complete lack of extras: no actor bios, commentary (which I would have really liked to have seen) -not even a theatrical trailer. For a movie of this quality, I would have expected a lot more.
I love this movie, so I got it anyway and am happy with it (after all, it won't deteriorate like VHS). But don't expect a Matrix quality disk or anything.
Read Best Reviews of The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) Here
If Fargo could bag an Oscar, The Hudsucker Proxy should be Required Viewing. To put it simply, this is sheer genius on tape, there really is so little not to like about this film.The Coens attempted to revive the screwball comedy genre, and boy did they do it. Tim Robbins enjoys himself immensely as the gormless mailroom boy promoted to company President in the space of one day as a patsy to allow boardroom creeps to gain control of the Hudsucker company. Jennifer Leigh's amalgam of Katharine Hepburn/Rosalind Russell/Jean Arthur (from the 1930s) is priceless. I personally felt Paul Newman was a bit wasted in his role, but that's just me.
However, these performances would be for nothing if it wasn't for the marvellous scriptwitness the boardroom scenes in which the directors discuss how many floors it was that Mr Hudsucker fell ("not including the mezzanine") or the scene in which they interrogate Norville about his new invention. The script is also responsible for the fantastic line "Y'know, for kids!" which means nothing if you haven't seen the movie but now always makes me laugh whenever I think of it.
Film making at its finest. Rent it, steal it, embezzle it -but watch this gem!
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In The Hudsucker Proxy the Coen brothers tackle the genre of classic American studio-produced comedy. It talks like the 30's, looks like the 40's and is set in a 50's New York that only exists as the workplace. The film, like any film by the Coens, is populated with characters that feel like they're something less than wholly human. The directors push their characters toward emulating the past's character actors with such uncanny precision that they become misshapen. None of these characters has a home or a life outside the workplace. The film, which follows the rise and fall of a mailroom clerk (Tim Robbins) that lives and creates the American dream, exists entirely within the tight sphere of its genre, and to stop to suggest more would only detract from the overall, streamlined effect.In my opinion, The Hudsucker Proxy is the closest the Coen brothers have come to creating a mission statement. It's a clever satire of the phoniness of the studio system's product that simultaneously seems to be celebrating it (or, perhaps, its ability to expose its own falseness). There's such a corporate cleanliness and symmetry to the film that one suspects the brothers' main target is assembly line, Hollywood-ized narrative itself. It's probably not coincidental that this film was the first Coen brothers film with a significant budget (over $30 million). The film's key sequence, and perhaps the key to understanding all of the Coens' work, is one in which a female reporter's (Jennifer Jason Leigh channeling Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell) investigations into what makes the Hudsucker Company tick take on a bold literal dimension. She meets Moses, a black custodian (a part that would feel racist if not for the film's satiric bent) that tends to the firm's oversized clock. The keeper of the machinery, he is the only person that understands the events as they transpire. He explains to Leigh's reporter the circularity of the situation and predicts the outcome of the events. The assertion here is that these characters act as they do because they've been programmed like machine parts to do so in order to achieve the film's desired outcome. In this film, which has been programmed so that the little guy will "win", he isn't even free to lose, since the story is ultimately being told by the big guys complete with their biases, stereotypes, and rigid sense of class structure. They've been getting rich off of selling the little guy a simpleminded, counterfeit dream that he eats up time and again. Worse yet, many little guys are tricked into thinking the big guy's version of their dreams is actually their dream. When the film closes with Moses' narration, his knowledge of another, similar, story that took place on an even higher floor that this one did sounds like nothing less than a threat.
It's rare to see such directness in a Coen brothers production, as they usually seem somewhat aloof about their motives. This film seems to be the key to understanding their work as a whole. Every head whip and hand swing of Leigh's character has to be accompanied by a whooshing sound because that's the requirement of the genre taken to its full extreme. They pump up the falseness inherent in this sort of character stereotype until it reaches its breaking point. In some of their films, such as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the bubble breaks revealing nothing profound underneath the façade. In their better films like this one, and The Big Lebowski, their best film, they manage to make that core of hollowness a reprimand to the ideals that the film's very specific time and place represent. Here, Hollywood's corporate perception of the American dream being a direct function of ingenuity and hard work seems to be the target. The inevitability of the story's outcome and the pre-destined happiness of its stars both feel like arbitrary rules a cruel game. And cruelly, at the film's end, there's little implication that the future holds anything but more of the same.
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