Southern Comfort

Our tour of the forgotten films of 1981 continues with Walter Hill's Southern Comfort. You can't find a review online for this film that doesn't consider the film as a Vietnam metaphor. And of course, it's clearly meant to reflect certain American feelings about that failed military venture, still fresh in everyone's minds in the early 8o's.

First off, the film is set during the height of the conflict, in 1973. And its story of National Guard soldiers lost inside a dense Louisiana swamp, on the run from crazed Cajuns bent on their destruction, contains several obvious references to the war. The soldiers fire blanks, they fight an emeny intimately familiar with the terrain, and they express constant, sometimes violent, disregard for the native inhabitants of the wetlands.

But to see the film exclusively through this interpretation misses a lot of what makes Comfort so successful. As with most cinematic allusions, unearthing the metaphorical threads only gets you so far. Hill's still telling a story, geopolitical references aside, and what he's created here is much more than an intellectual exercize. It's an exciting, pessimistic adventure story, a harrowing vision of humanity at its weakest and most peculiar.



Keith Carradine stars as Spencer, a longtime Private First Class in the Lousiana State National Guard, who's both the most clever and most jaded member of his squad. Powers Boothe plays Corporal Harden, a real nasty piece of work who has just transferred to Louisiana from the Texas National Guard. (Hey, I wonder if he knew the President...yeah, probably not). Along with several other soldiers, they're sent into the forbidding, remote wetlands on an exercize, carrying with them few supplies and rifles loaded with blanks.

It's not long into their misadventure that an incident occurs with a group of local Cajun fishermen. And this is when the Vietnam references become the most immediately apparent. The cavalier, sadistic Reece (an excellent Fred Ward) slices up a Cajun fishing net, ignorant redneck Stuckey (Lewis Smith) fires a round of blanks at some locals as a prank, and the dismissively named "Coach" Bowden starts to crack up under the pressure.

I think the real point here isn't that the Cajuns are similar to the Viet Cong, or that the situation is all that similar to the South Asian conflict. Hill seems most interested in exploring the attitudes of the soldiers, and here is where the Vietnam parallel becomes most salient. These guys don't like the Cajuns, don't understand them and don't want to understand them. After the film becomes violent, obviously the communication falls apart between the two groups, and there's little to no hope for a satisfying, non-violent solution.

By the film's conclusion, when Spencer and Hardin finally reach what appears to be a peaceful Cajun village, this notion has come full-circle. Nothing about these people is what it seems, and the soldiers lack of understanding of this culture has led them right into a trap. A bravura closing sequence intercuts between a traditional Cajun-style hoedown and Hardin meeting a potentially bloody end. For the soldiers, the Cajun people, their town, their culture and their lifestyle has come to represent one thing and one thing only: death.

But as I said, the Vietnam stuff is only part of the story. What keeps the viewer's interest isn't constant references to foreign wars. It's the strength of Hill's direction, Boothe and Carradine's charismatic yet gritty performances and Hill regular Andrew Lazlo's fabulous cinematography, giving us a bayou made up entirely of deep brown water, thick pockets of overgrown trees and foreboding dark shadows.

It's so refreshing as well to see a violent film unafraid to show you real violence. So often today, with studios all clamoring for PG-13 ratings and the additional box office promised by adolescent viewers, films with violent, dark subject matter like Southern Comfort wind up diluted, neutered by the MPAA and an over-sensitive public. This is a movie about a small group soldiers encountering a crafty, angry menace, and it doesn't shy away from demonstrating the cost of their tresspassing. Early on, when Peter Coyote's Sgt. Poole runs afoul of a Cajun sharpshooter, we're alerted that Southern Comfort won't be pulling any punches. The violence ratches up the tension, lets us know these Cajuns mean business, and highlights the film's brooding themes of conflict and misunderstanding.

Hill made this film during the height of his critical and commercial success. Two years earlier, he'd directed the modern classic The Warriors (for which he's currently scripting a remake), the year before he'd directed the excellent The Long Riders with not one, not two but three Carradines (Keith, David and Robert). And the very next year, in 1982, he'd essentially invent the interracial buddy cop genre with 48 Hours. This is action cinema at its most immediate, gripping, shocking and intense. Another excellent film from 1981.