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liOCjJv nUlJbOiN The constructed hero
Hudson in hot pursuit of Lollobrigida in Come September.
"I think," Rock Hudson has been heard to say, "that I'm rather average." In terms of talent, the statement is certainly true enough. Despite a recently discovered — and quite modest — ability to play light comedy, it has to be said that his chief attribute seems to be a rather dogged determination to do the right thing. By dint of constant effort, which makes one uncomfortable, the way unnatural things do, he gets through his parts. In comedies like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, shrewd directors have made his unease a comic virtue, and his good-natured goofiness, while hardly a challenge to Cary Grant, is quite amusing. But in serious roles, Hudson communicates nothing so much as strain. Since he is really too pretty to be believed as a Western hero, that traditional refuge of the non-actor is denied him. Still, average though his talent may be, Hudson's road to stardom was exceptional. A truck driver, he habitually parked near studio gates, arranged himself against a fender and awaited discovery. It was agent Henry Willson, a specialist in oddly named leading men for the teen-age market,
who guided him upward. Observing Roy Fitzgerald's massive proportions and rather slow ways of speech and movement, this unacclaimed genius found his thoughts turning to things as steadfast as the Rock of Gibraltar, as majestic as the Hudson River. Thus did Willson achieve his greatest triumph of nomenclature.
Hudson came to greatness — if that is the word for it — in the faceless fifties, when the demand for oddly angled personalities, particularly among the teen-agers (increasingly the majority of moviegoers), reached its lowest point. Hudson's screen personality, rubbed down by a hundred eager craftsmen, was polished as smooth as a piece of sandstone worn by the river whose name he bore. In a way, he was dehumanized. He became an everyman who was also a nobody — a kind of generalized dream American. In a way it is too bad; there has to be something interesting about a fellow who attempts to get discovered the way Hudson did. One would have liked to know the young man leaning against that truck.
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