A Blast Of Hollywood Bile

Robbins is the dolt Newman plucks from the Hudsucker company mailroom and makes president. Hot-shot reporter Leigh, smelling a rat, poses as Robbins's secretary and wins his heart while pillorying him in print. But the idiot is a savant: his simple-minded invention-the hula hoop becomes a national obsession, forcing Newman to find new ways to crush him.

"The Hudsucker Proxy," which the Coens co-wrote with Sam Raimi, has sequences as dazzling as anything they've done. It also has passages that are unusually strained and shrill: gags that only reveal the effort that went into them. Movie buffs will lap up the inventive variations on old conventions and revel in Leigh's astonishing mile-a-minute amalgam of Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. But even by the Coens' cool standards, "Hudsucker" is a chilly experience (you don't go to the Coens for the milk of human kindness). Brilliant as its artifice is, there's something hollow at its core. In the past, the Coens took old genres and twisted them into distinctive new shapes. Here they seem as much imprisoned by old movies as inspired. This supremely self-conscious comedy is both delightful and exhausting. But never for a moment do you doubt that it's exactly the movie they wanted to make. Its gleeful, cartoon heartlessness is for real.

© 1994