A midwestern hayseed inadvertently becomes a big business executive.
By 1994 Joel and Ethan Coen had already released their Southern neo-noir thriller Blood Simple, the frenzied comedy Raising Arizona, depression-era crime drama Miller's Crossing, and the Cannes Film Festival triumph of their surreal Barton Fink. Now armed with credibility and cache, they teamed up with ambitious producer Joel Silver for their most ambitious project to date.
The Hudsucker Proxy was a project the Coens had been working on since the early 1980s with fellow filmmaker Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead trilogy), but the period setting made it outside their financial means for the next decade. Envisioned as an homage to the 1930s screwball comedies of Preston Sturges and the populist works of Frank Capra, Silver provided the means to realization.
Cast in the lead role was Tim Robbins, only known at this point for his work in Bull Durham. Jennifer Jason Leigh in the female lead is seen doing her best Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday) impression as a savvy newspaper reporter. The cast is filled out with veteran character actors including John Mahoney (Frasier, Say Anything) and Charles Durning, and in a rare villainous role, the legendary Paul Newman.
Most of the film was shot on sound stages, with some location work done in Chicago (despite the New York-set story). Returning the cinematographer's chair is Roger Deakins in his second of many collaborations with the Coens. Other returning friends include score composer Carter Burwell. Raimi has a small cameo and also did Second Unit direction on the production.
The film shares with Sturges a satirical approach to institutions, the corporate world in particular here. Throughout the film is a visual motif of circular images competing against the vertical lines of the architecture and business aesthetic.
While intended as a mainstream project, the film was received as an arthouse oddity, with mixed critical reviews and a failure at the box office. Over time the film has become one of the Coens most underrated works, and the brothers would revisit Sturges again with their 2000 film O, Brother Where Art Thou?
Running time is approx. 2 hours.
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