Paul Newman and director Martin Ritt had worked together previously, to their mutual satisfaction, on three other films (The Long, Hot Summer [1958],Paris Blues [1961], Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man [1962]), so they decided to form a business partnership, striking a deal with major studios to produce a handful of pictures. Hud was to be their first effort under that new deal.

Ritt and Newman chose to adapt a novel that had been published a few years earlier, Horseman, Pass By, the first novel by Larry McMurtry. The story had its genesis in short stories McMurtry published in a student magazine during his undergraduate years at North Texas State College (now known as the University of North Texas). One concerned the destruction of a herd of infected cattle and another was about the death of an old rancher. Both motifs formed the bones of the novel McMurtry began writing upon graduating in 1958. The title was taken from the epitaph on the tombstone of William Butler Yeats, from Yeats' poem "Under Ben Bulben": "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death/Horseman, pass by!"

In the original novel the focus was on Texas ranch life seen through the eyes of the teenage character Lonnie Bannon. Hud was not the major character in the story but Ritt and Newman were attracted to the idea of building a film around the type of unrepentive character found in early Hollywood features like Clark Gable's badass protagonist in San Francisco (1936). "For the first half of the picture, he's a prick, and then some lady, or Spencer Tracy, or God, converts him in the second half," Ritt noted. But in the version Ritt discussed with screenwriters (and married couple) Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch, Hud was not to be given even a glimmer of redemption at the end and remained an unapologetic heel, the kind of character, Ritt said, "that had not yet existed in American films." The director and writers agreed this approach would sacrifice nothing of the original novel and actually add a new dimension to the story.

Most stars would have considered playing such an unremitting louse to be a risky career move, especially for one who was riding the crest of stardom like Newman. But the actor was eager to commit to this provocative concept because he felt that some of his recent roles, among them two screen versions of Tennessee Williams plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), had been compromised by censorship that softened the characterizations.

A popular leading man of the 1930s and 40s, Melvyn Douglas had mostly been away from the big screen in the 1950s, honing his reputation as a first-rate character actor on stage and television for more than a decade. His return to feature films after an 11-year hiatus commenced with Billy Budd (1962). He decided to follow that film with Hud, not only because he liked the script but because he did not have to do anything to convince Ritt he could play the role. "I could scarcely believe I was dealing with someone from Hollywood," he later said of the director's eagerness to cast him.

Ritt had known Patricia Neal since they both worked at the Actor's Studio several years earlier (it was also where Ritt and Neal met Newman). He sent her the script for Hud with the "hope you won't think the part is too small." Not only did she not care about the size of the role, but Neal later said she was hooked from the first description of the character as "a tall woman, shapely, comfortable and pretty. She has an indulgent knowledge of the world, and it makes for a flat, humorous, candid manner."

For the part of the young man who comes to learn that his uncle Hud is not to be admired and emulated, Ritt chose Brandon de Wilde, who had made a big impression at the age of 10 in his screen debut in The Member of the Wedding (1952), recreating the role he played on Broadway. The child actor followed that with an iconic role in Shane (1953), as the young boy who hero-worshipped the cowboy title hero, an interesting and ironic counterpoint to his part in Hud.

by Rob Nixon