Joel Coen, Ethan Coen and Sam Raimi, "The Hudsucker Proxy"
It�s easy to list my top two favorite Coen Brother films. First Place: Miller�s Crossing. Second Place: The Big Lebowski. After that it gets a lot harder. I mean, there�s the funny looking little guy in Fargo, not to mention how great William H. Macy is in that movie. There�s the �Go to sleep little bab-ee� scene with the sirens in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Along with the side character of the racist who just happens to be blind)
Raising Arizona has babies in it, and it�s the only movie with babies in it that doesn�t make me run want to kill babies. The Man Who Wasn�t There has that little speech about how the hair keeps growing after the body dies, and the shyster lawyer from Sacramento. Barton Fink has a lot of great scenes with all the side characters, most notably with the cops (�You�re a sick fuck, Fink.�) and the producer. I can�t remember much from Blood Simple, and that probably takes last place in my list anyway.
And then there�s The Hudsucker Proxy. Some people, even people who love the Coen Brothers, hate this film. Glen Lovell from the San Jose Mercury News even brought it up in his list of turkeys at the end of the year simply saying, �Hudsucker sucked.� I don�t see why people hate it. I think it�s a great film, even deep, in a cartoonish Preston Sturges kind of way, which is what they were aiming toward. A lot of people also hated Jennifer Jason Leigh�s character of Amy Archer, or more specific, hated her voice throughout the film. But if you ever saw His Girl Friday, you see where the inspiration comes from. And she�s good at it.
The dialogue is great, on par with the back and forth put-downs from Miller�s Crossing, and the film just starts with an incredible burst of energy and keeps it up throughout, admirable particularly because of how fast they keep things moving.
Of course, this is just a screenplay of a film I can probably recite by heart, so there�s no reason for me to read it except out of slavish fan worship. Still though, it was great to read. I finally figured out one line that Moses says to Amy inside the clock room. (I thought it was ��Cause it looks piddily.� Turns out the line is ��Cause they�s little pigglies!�) And this has a few lines that were taken out of the film (though there aren�t many, I guess they got it pretty close to being right the first time).
Example: the two cabbies who give the speech to each other at the diner where Norville first meets Amy were apparently supposed to show up at the beatnik coffee bar at the end when the two reunite. It really seemed like it would have worked, and I�m not sure why they decided to cut it.
Also, seeing this written out in script you can really see how much a good actor can do with a part. The best examples come from facial gestures or body movements, such as when Amy calls her editor an orangutan and pretends to pick ticks from his head, then looking with disgust at the hair that comes out at her fingers. That�s nowhere in the script. There must have been some improvisation as well, like when Norville mispronounces Karma, as that�s not in here either. In any case, it was really a lot of fun to read, more so than I would have expected, and it makes me want to watch the film again.
The thing is, I just watched it two weeks ago.
Oh, and I'm sorry that this review is more boring than Intolerable Cruelty.
