The different treatments of the same story in the novel Horseman, Pass By and the film Hud … show clearly the difficulty of translating the "mood" of a work of fiction into film and the necessity imposed by a visual medium of having characters act as visible foils to each other…. [The] film closely follows the plot of the novel, both in specific incident and in general intent. Horseman, Pass By … is remembered in retrospect through the eyes of Lonnie, its now older boyhood observer, who reflects upon the significance of a series of events that had happened on the ranch of his grandfather, Homer Bannon. Homer, a man past eighty years old, his wife, and Hud, her son by a former marriage, live on a ranch in Texas together with Lonnie and Halmea, the black cook and housekeeper. At the beginning of the novel a dead heifer has been discovered that turns out to be a victim of hoof-and-mouth disease. Homer's cattle must all be destroyed in order to halt the spread of the disease, and the reactions of the characters in the novel to the worst disaster which can strike a cattleman, form both the conflict in the novel's plot and the catalyst for Lonnie's transition to adulthood.
In a sense the differences between the two treatments of the story are indicated by the change in title from Horseman, Pass By to Hud. (pp. 365-66)
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