Flop and Fizzle #21: We need more missteps like THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!
by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer
The Hudsucker Proxy is a beautiful piece of phonetics. It sounds incredible, like what "cellar door" thinks it is, but it's meaningless if you haven't watched the first ten minutes of the film it's representing. Have the Coen brothers ever focus tested a title? This was their fifth feature, after Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink, and while those are all excellent titles, they don't mean anything to a person looking at a poster or reading a marquee without context. They wouldn't make a film with a name fully legible to the layman until 1996's Fargo, and that's a movie that takes place almost entirely outside of Fargo. Their next two films, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, were named after a character in that film and the fake movie in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, respectively. There is absolutely no way you could look at the titles of these movies and have any idea what they were about.
There are more questions suggested by the film’s existence. Did Warner Bros. and Universal think the Golden Age of Hollywood-style screwball comedy was going to make a comeback? Sturges and Howard Hawks were long dead, Billy Wilder hadn't made a film in over a decade, and none of their writers were remotely active. The last big throwback screwball success was probably What's Up Doc? made by Peter Bogdanovich 22 years earlier. Maybe something was in the air: George Lucas finally produced his long-gestating screwball bomb Radioland Murders the same year. Everybody was betting on the same decrepit, old screwball horse in 1994 as audiences lost their minds over Jim Carrey vehicles. The dialogue-heavy speed-talking here stood against a kind of buffoonery the Coens could not sanction.
And on the topic of Warner Bros. and Universal, did they look at the Coens' previous two films, twin masterpieces Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink, see their poor box office performance, and assume they were flukes and that Hudsucker would blow up? Hudsucker has twice the budget of any previous Coen film, and, even as their critical reputation continued to grow, they wouldn't get a similar budget again for another six years. They had proven they could make do with much less. Why did the studios think they needed more?
And did why did anybody think the Coen brothers could pull off a Frank Capra warmth? Raising Arizona is sweet, and its ending will always get me to tear up a bit. However, their other three features are harsh, desperate movies. Hudsucker opens with a man about to jump to his death and then cuts back in time to a different man jumping from that same window. Their co-writer Sam Raimi wrote and directed the Evil Dead movies and Darkman. His most recent film at the time was Army of Darkness. These people had proven themselves to be funny, but the big Capra ending and the Wilder comfortability should have seemed as foreign to them as the wuxia epic.
And if you liked the Coens, if you were primed to see what they would make, wouldn't you be disappointed to see their regular stable of performers were barely present? Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito and John Goodman had places deep in the credits and folks like John Turturro and Frances McDormand were absent.
And would the random person in a movie theater look at the poster or watch that trailer and think "What a concept, sign me up, a businessman creates the hula hoop!" Was that high concept supposed to click, to be enough to convert people who would have just seen things like Reality Bites and Four Weddings and a Funeral?
Some movies have bad timing or they're marketed poorly, but there is no way The Hudsucker Proxy was ever going to be a hit. It might have made its money back if it had followed Fargo, but that feels like the best case scenario. And yet I am so happy that nobody was able to see the writing on the wall. A lot of powerful people have to fuck up so that the rest of us can enjoy movies as idiosyncratically great as Hudsucker. Mega-producer Joel Silver had to trade on his reputation and believe in magic to lose this much money on a film.
There are problems here, but they aren't the ones most critics covered. For as great as Bill Cobbs is as Moses the clock mechanic, we really didn't need him to be a Magical Black Man (writing non-white characters has been a lifelong struggle for both Coens (don't watch The Ladykillers unless you're ready for some straight up racism (don't watch The Ladykillers))). And the Coens themselves have both grown in my eyes (Inside Llewyn Davis was their most recent perfect piece of art, and they've made many) and been diminished (their relationship with Scott Rudin is a bummer, a decade-long lapse in judgment and morality, etc.). Sam Raimi made that Oz movie, which I saw in the theater.
But this is an incredible piece of work, so much of it still hilarious. "Watchable" isn't a word you can use to describe most flops–often, movies fail miserably because they're uneven–but I have watched Hudsucker on TV a dozen times. I've owned it since I was a teenager, and I'll still sit through the ads and editing if it comes on in a hotel room. If this article didn't have a due date, I'd watch it again right now. The DVD is still in my player, so why not? I know why this thing failed. Nobody should ever have assumed Hudsucker would pay off. If only the movie industry messed up this badly more often.