Breaking Down The Hudsucker Proxy

Added: 11/08/2007

What happens when you mix blind greed with outward stupidity and mix in a little careless cover up? You get a situation not unlike what happens in the Hudsucker Proxy. It also helps when you have a veteran cast that includes superstars like Paul Newman and Tim Robbins to tell your story. Having an Oscar winning director like Joel Cohen and his brother Ethan doesn’t hurt either.

The year 1994 was a good year for actor Tim Robbins. He got to appear in a fun movie like the Hudsucker Proxy and then he also wound up in an Academy Award winning movie called the Shawshank Redemption. He also starred in the underground hit movie IQ as well. That isn’t a bad year for an Oscar caliber actor. The year 1994 was also a good year for acting icon Paul Newman as well. He got nominated for his work in the 1994 movie Nobody’s Fool and at the 1994 Academy Awards ceremony he was awarded with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his work outside of movie making. That is also a pretty good year even for an acting legend like Paul Newman. For all that Newman and Robbins did separately in 1994 they also managed to accomplish something else pretty neat in 1994. The Hudsucker Proxy also came out in 1994 and while it wasn’t a box office smash it still got the critics and a decent section of the movie going public talking about its dark humor, its twists and turns within the plot, and the general fun that people have when watching this movie. The Hudsucker Proxy got nominated for the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival but that was about it. The Hudsucker Proxy is considered a very underrated movie because for everything it seemed to lack in interesting a mass audience it seemed to make up for in substance when you actually gave The Hudsucker Proxy a chance.

The Hudsucker Proxy is a twisted comedy about a man named Waring Hudsucker commits suicide while he is the head of hugely successful Hudsucker Industries. After his death the less than grieving members of the board devised a plan to try and make millions of dollars in profit off of their founder’s untimely death. They decided to hire a complete incompetent drone to take over for Hudsucker and watch as the incompetent drone drives the stock price for Hudsucker Industries to record lows. Then the board members would buy up all of the low priced stock and take over the company. News of competent business people taking over the company will cause the price of the stock to soar and they would all be rich. For their patsy the board members chose Norville Barnes played by Tim Robbins. When head of the board Sidney Mussberger, played by Paul Newman, tells mailroom worker Barnes that he is the new head of the company Barnes can’t believe it. As time goes by it looks like the board’s plan is working to perfection until reporter Amy Archer, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, starts to poke around and starts to find out the truth. From there the Hudsucker Proxy really begins to pick up steam.

On February 3, 1975 the CEO of United Fruit Company, Eli Black, threw his briefcase through his 44th floor office window in New York City and jumped to his death. Such is the inspiration of the Hudsucker Proxy. When you have an event like that as your inspiration there really is no telling where things can go from there and the Hudsucker Proxy takes the movie goer on quite an interesting ride. Paul Newman is perfect in this movie and Tim Robbins plays the bumbling fool to perfection as he always does. Pay attention as you watch the Hudsucker Proxy though as things are not always what they seem and even then they are always changing.

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