Director: Joel Coen
Writers: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Sam Raimi

Cast:
Tim Robbins as Norville Barnes, a lowly mailroom employee whom the Board of Directors make President because they think his incompetence will make the company stock fall so that they can buy it up cheaply.

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Amy Archer, an unscrupulous reporter who pretends to be an innocent small town girl in order to win the confidence of Barnes to gain information she can use in an exposé of his inadequacies.

Paul Newman as Sidney J. Mussburger, unscrupulous second-in-command of the company, left in charge when owner Waring Hudsucker (played by Charles Durning) commits suicide.

Bill Cobbs as Moses, ancient maintenance man who knows all the secrets of the Hudsucker company.

These four characters carry the story so I was amazed, in looking at the IMDb site, to see the lengthy list of a cast that numbers more than seventy.

I watched the whole movie before I realized that it was a Coen production. If I'd known to begin with, my reaction might have been very different. I would have expected it to be off the wall. As it was, I kept trying to fit what I was seeing into some existing genre.

The Hudsucker Proxy combines the features of a Sunday comic and a dream. As usual with a Coen film, the movie is meticulously cast and includes such Coen standbys as John Goodman and Steve Buscemi in tiny parts. Donna Isaacson and John S. Lyons were nominated for Best Casting for Feature Film, Comedy by the Casting Society of America USA in 1994.

Although the film received no Oscar nominations, the British Society of Cinematographers nominated it for the Best Cinematography Award, and it was nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

As far as I can learn, the movie was filmed in Chicago and North Carolina, but cinematographer Roger Deakins received a London Critics Circle Film Award for "Best Technical Achievement of the Year."

I am not going to try to describe the film other than to say that anyone who loves old movies will recognize echoes of numerous productions and actors of the past, for example the cadences of Katherine Hepburn in Leigh's delivery.

The newsroom scenes recall the fast-paced verbal exchanges between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940).

The cityscapes and the workings of the Hudsucker clock made me think of Metropolis (1927) and Modern Times (1936). The story of a simple, decent, small town boy making good in the heartless Big City is in the vein of a Frank Capra movie. In fact, the film is a pastiche and the characters are flat, cartoon figures. Could be that's why it was a box office flop, costing about $40 million to make and earning only about $3 million upon its first release.

Popular success or not, The Hudsucker Proxy possesses the Coen magic and is worth at least one viewing.