Rochelle Hudson spent the 1930s as the sweet girl on the edge of the frame, and the studios kept her there. The two films of hers we have reviewed give her little to do; what interests us is how completely the parts describe the career.
Fi1m perspective
In She Done Him Wrong (1933) she is Sally, a girl Mae West's Lou pulls back from a bad end in the first ten minutes. It is a decent ten minutes: she is small and frightened and grateful, and then the film sets her down and does not pick her up again. Twenty-two years later, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), she is Judy's Mother, one of the parents Nicholas Ray draws too simply so that the children have something to push against. Between those two small parts sits a whole career, and the parts describe it fairly.
She was signed by RKO at fourteen, in November 1930, and named a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931. Through the decade she worked steadily as the ingénue or the young supporting player: Grace in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Jessie Pullman grown to eighteen in Imitation of Life (1934), Cosette in Les Misérables (1935), Shirley Temple's older sister in Curly Top (1935). She stood beside West, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, with whom she made four films, and Temple. She was also, for years, the voice of Honey, Bosko's girlfriend, in 32 Looney Tunes shorts, which may be the part in which she was heard by most people. By the 1940s the pictures were B-pictures. There was a brief return to higher-profile work in the 1950s and 1960s, and a last film in 1967.
"They kept me sweet and innocent for years," she said later, and it is a fair account. The one place critics consistently point to for her dramatic work is Imitation of Life, which we have not reviewed and will not judge here. What we can say is that in She Done Him Wrong we noticed her in the first reel and did not think of her again until the credits, and we were not proud of that, because she had done nothing wrong. Harvey F. Thew and John Bright's script is built to let West walk towards the camera, and Lowell Sherman's direction is mostly a matter of knowing where to stand it. Everyone else is furniture, and Hudson was hired to be well-made furniture.
That is the difficulty in writing about her. A supporting player of this kind is judged by how little she gets in the way, and by that measure she was good at her job for a long time. She made the star look generous and the leading man look kind and then she went home.
If you want to see what she did, start with She Done Him Wrong and watch the first ten minutes closely. The film will not ask you to again.
Biography
Rochelle Hudson (born Rachael Elizabeth Hudson) was an American actress. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on 6 March 1916, she began her career as a teenager and was named a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931. She signed with RKO Pictures in 1930.
Hudson appeared in numerous films through the 1930s and 1960s. She is known for roles in She Done Him Wrong (1933), Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Imitation of Life (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Curly Top (1935), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) as Judy's mother, Strait-Jacket (1964) and The Night Walker (1964). She also co-starred in the television series That's My Boy in 1954–55. Hudson died on 17 January 1972.
