I know it was released in 1963 but in the store the boy and the owner talk about the paperback book From Here to Eternity by James Jones. This book was written in 1951 and the paperback book probably would have came out in 1952 (with the movie being made in 1953). What do you all think? It has been a while since I have seen the movie so it is possible there were cars in the movie made years later.
shareYeah but I had bought to kill a mockingbird in the 1990. Just I cause I bought it doesn't mean it's 1960. Hud's car is a 1958 Cadillac if that helps. Check at 2:11.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HFUV-zhrCA&feature=related
Well, just before the pig's contest the teenagers were dancing Twist. Then it could not be 58. More like 62 or 63.
shareGood point about From Here to Eternity. First thing I noticed watching this the second time. The owner mentions the part in the book where "the sargent gets her the first time", and if the movie was out by then, either the owner or Lon would have at least mentioned the movie. However Lon is only about 16 here, so setting could of been in arond 1960. If it was set in 1960, Lon would have been unfamiliar with the film, as he would of only been about 9 when the film came out. As for the book on the shelf--this is a small town and perhaps the book was distributed here years after it first was released, and Lon is just discovering it the first time-he would have been too young to grasp it in 1952-as he would have been perhaps 8. But I feel setting is very early 1960s with the aforementioned scene a possible error in screenplay.
share"Hud" was set in the present (filmed in late 1962 and released in the spring of 1963), and the copy of "From Here To Eternity" Lon picks up from the drug store book rack was the current paperback edition of the novel at the time. The novel was still well-known, twelve years after its 1951 publication, as a racy, "adult" read.
Lon at 16 probably wouldn't have had any exposure to the 1953 film version (unless he had seen it at the little movie theater in his small Texas town on a re-release).
For the definitive answer, look to the diner fight scene. There's a 1962 calendar hanging on the wall.
shareVPINON01 makes a good point -- that FROM HERE TO ETERNITY is on the shelf is pointing out that it is a small town, where the past lingers on. But it also underscores the theme that Hud makes explicit: That despite the piousness professed by men like Homer Bannon, Hud's father, they have the same feelings below the belt that he does. They just cover it up. (Was Hud a late baby? An unexpected baby? Did he kill his mother in childbirth, creating Homer's antipathy towards him?) The druggist, who in that town and in those days would have been a pillar of the community, asks Lon about whether he read the first time the sergeant got her. He is a filthy old man! LOL! (At first I thought he was making a gay pass at Lon, but I realize he is just a regular old fart who is actually treating Lon as an equal -- this is a repressed area, and he is trying to share an inside joke or insight with Lon, who is almost an adult. It also highlights the theme that unlike Hud, his father's generation is hypocritical.)
Oh, James Jones was the first serious writer to become a millionaire, according to his erstwhile friend Norman Mailer. He was famous or infamous at the time for writing "dirty" passages in his books. His frankness when writing sex scenes went beyond Hemingway's frankness, which was infamous in its own day, and is quaint to us today. Also, he made his fortune -- Jones did -- by paperback sales.
Those wire racks of paperbacks with lurid covers were ubiquitous when I was a child in the 1960s.
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"Why do people always laugh in the wrong places?"
--Francis Scott Key
Hud is driving a '57 or '58 Cadillac Couple De Ville. So it is supposed to be 1962.
(Hud goes away to the Army when he is 17, which would be about 1945. THe draft -- there is a reference in how he tried to avoid it -- became near universal in 1944. The kicker is it didn't kick in until you were 18, so -- as Hud says "You don't know the whole story" -- there is something deliberately "wrong" with what has happened. He likely has run away from home to escape his father, who has likely not as noble as the story indicates. (There was huge national debate towards the end of the war about using teenagers in combat. FDR, when he created the peacetime draft and later expanded it, vowed he would not use teenagers in combat. By 1944, the deamnds for manpower led to that promise being voided.)
Hud is 34 in the movie.
One thing about time a generation or two ago: It was slower. Books -- in those days, a major book lasted for years and years. A movie could run for more than a year at one theater, and would be revived every two years. GONE WITH THE WIND was being revived in the 1970s.
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"Why do people always laugh in the wrong places?"
--James Joyce
The TV set looked quite "modern" didn't it?
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