Southern Comfort (1981 film)

Southern Comfort
File:Southerncomfortposter.jpg Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Walter Hill
Produced by	David Giler
Written by	Michael Kane Walter Hill David Giler
Starring	Keith Carradine Powers Boothe Fred Ward T. K. Carter Franklyn Seales
Music by	Ry Cooder
Cinematography	Andrew Laszlo
Edited by	Freeman A. Davies
Production company	Cinema Group Ventures Phoenix (II)
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release dates	September 25, 1981 (1981-09-25)
Running time	105 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$7.6 million
Box office	262,625 admissions (France)

Southern Comfort is a 1981 American action/thriller film directed by Walter Hill and written by Michael Kane, and Hill and his longtime collaborator David Giler. It stars Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward, T. K. Carter, Franklyn Seales, and Peter Coyote. The film, set in 1973, features a Louisiana Army National Guard squad of nine on weekend maneuvers in rural bayou country as they antagonize some local Cajun people and become hunted.

Plot

A squad of nine Louisiana National Guard soldiers convene in a local bayou for weekend maneuvers. New to the squad is Corporal Hardin (Boothe), a cynical transfer from the Texas National Guard. He soon becomes disgusted with the arrogant behavior and attitudes of the men. A happily-married engineer in his civilian life, Hardin wants no part of a date with prostitutes which PFC Spencer (Carradine) has arranged for himself and their squad-mates. Nevertheless, he hits it off with the amiable Spencer; both find themselves to be the most level-headed soldiers in their squad.

The nine soldiers set out on patrol and soon get lost in the swamp. They come across a seemingly-abandoned campsite with several pirogues. To continue onward, the NGs will need the pirogues; otherwise, they will need to turn back. The squad's leader, Staff Sergeant Poole (Peter Coyote), orders the soldiers into three of the pirogues. As they set out and ride across the bayou, a group of Cajun hunter-trappers return and yell at the soldiers for having taken their pirogues. In response, as a practical joke, PFC Stuckey fires blanks from his M-60 machine gun at the Cajuns. They return fire, killing Poole, and sending the squad into a frenzy as they make their way toward cover.

Sgt. Casper (Les Lannom) - the strict, inexperienced, and unpopular second-in-command - orders the squad to continue their "mission." They discover that Cpl. Reece (Ward) has brought along a box of live ammunition for hunting purposes. Casper divides the ammo evenly among the soldiers, in order to bolster their chances of defense. They reach the shack of a one-armed Cajun trapper-hunter (Brion James), who speaks only French. Casper has him arrested as a POW. The emotionally-unstable Cpl. Bowden (Carlos Brown) uses gasoline to ignite some TNT inside the shack, blowing it up.

The soldiers feel increasingly threatened. Hearing the barking of dogs, the NGs presume they're about to be rescued. The dogs, however, belong to the Cajuns...who are now stalking the soldiers because of Stuckey's actions. The NGs fend off the attacking dogs, only to find that lethal boobytraps have been set for them. Pvt. Cribbs (T.K. Carter) is killed when he trips over a spear-bed built into a spring-released cradle-frame. The squad camps for the night. The following morning, Reece tortures the one-armed Cajun by dunking his head in a fetid pond. Hardin discovers this and tries to stop it. Both soldiers get in a fight to the death with bayonets, from which Hardin emerges triumphant...while the one-armed Cajun escapes into the bayou.

As a helicopter passes overhead, the soldiers frantically but vainly signal it. Rushing off after the chopper as it moves onward, Stuckey sinks to his death in quicksand. Having had it up to here with Casper's mis-leadership and ineptitude, Spencer relieves him of command. They split up to search for Stuckey. Instead, Casper and Simms locate the murderous Cajuns...who slaughter them both.

Spencer, Hardin, and the now-addled Bowden camp for the night. The following morning, Bowden has disappeared. Hardin and Spencer discover a freight train and proceed to follow the tracks. They find Bowden hanging dead from a bridge. The one-armed Cajun appears on the tracks overhead. In perfect English, he warns Spencer and Hardin to leave the Cajuns' territory while they still can. He gives them directions on how to escape the bayou...since Hardin and Spencer saved him from physical assault by Simms and, respectively, Reece.

Following the one-armed Cajun's advice, Spencer and Hardin hitch a ride with a Cajun couple. They are driven to a pig roast at a nearby Cajun village. As Spencer happily mixes with the villagers, a wary Hardin sees the arrival of the hunter-trappers who massacred their squad. Hardin's would-be-killers chase him into a shed and wound him in the arm. Spencer shows up without warning; there is a violent struggle, in which the two NGs trick and kill both of their remaining pursuers. Then Spencer and Hardin slip away from the village, back into the swamp. As they come to a dirt road, another helicopter appears overhead. A U.S. Army truck drives toward them.

Cast

• Keith Carradine as Private Spencer
• Powers Boothe as Corporal Hardin
• Fred Ward as Corporal Reece
• Franklyn Seales as Private Simms
• T. K. Carter as Private Cribbs
• Lewis Smith as Private Stuckey
• Les Lannom as Sergeant Casper
• Peter Coyote as Staff Sergeant Poole
• Alan Autry as Corporal Bowden (billed as Carlos Brown)
• Brion James as Cajun Trapper
• Sonny Landham as Hunter

Production

Hill first wrote the script in 1976. At one stage it was known as The Prey.

The plot of Walter Hill's earlier film, The Warriors, is based on a barely similar idea, that of a group of warriors who are chased by a large number of enemies through treacherous territory in order to reach their home; in that case, Coney Island. For Southern Comfort, home is English-speaking Louisiana. The literary archetype for this film can be found in the Anabasis of Xenophon. The Anabasis tells the story of the Ten Thousand, a Greek mercenary army that had fought for Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to usurp the throne of the Persian Empire from his brother, Artaxerxes II. When Cyrus died in the Battle of Cunaxa, the Greeks were forced to march through unfamiliar territory in what are now the countries of Iraq and Turkey while frequently being attacked by the people living in those regions.

According to Walter Hill he and David Giler had a deal with 20th Century Fox to "acquire and develop interesting, commercial scripts that could be produced cheaply. Alien (1979) was one of them, and Southern Comfort was another. We wanted to do a survival story, and I’d already done a film in Louisiana."

They hired a writer to do a draft which Giler and Hill then rewrote. According to Hill, "No studio wanted to make it, but an independent guy showed up who had a relationship with Fox. Liked it, said he would finance it."

The movie was shot in Louisiana over 55 days in the Caddo Lake area outside Shreveport. Hill:

We were very aware that people were going to see it as a metaphor for Vietnam. The day we had the cast read, before we went into the swamps, I told everybody, 'People are going to say this is about Vietnam. They can say whatever they want, but I don’t want to hear another word about it.'"

The film is supported by an atmospheric soundtrack by longstanding Hill collaborator Ry Cooder. The song "Parlez Nous à Boire," sung during the scene in the Cajun village at the end of the film, was performed by Cajun musician Dewey Balfa. The film includes many actors, including Fred Ward and Peter Coyote, who had one of their first big roles here.

Powers Boothe was cast after Hill and Giler saw him play Jim Jones in the mini series Guyana Tragedy.

Hill said the concept of Keith Carradine's character "was that he was one of nature's aristocrats - graceful, confident of his own ability and able to separate himself from other people with an amusing remark", whereas the character played by Boothe "is much more the rational, hardworking, self made individual" and as a result "just cannot believe the nature of the situation at first" whereas Carradine's can.

Hill later said he enjoyed the experience of making the film but that it was tough:

I was very proud of the actors in it. It was a tough movie to make, and they put up with a lot. They would probably tell you they put up with a lot from me. [Laughs.] But they really did it without complaint. And I just thought I was very fortunate to have the cast that I had. Jesus, it was a hard movie to make... I think when you see the movie you can see that this one wasn’t nightclubs in Vegas. But it was just very hard locations to get in there. Very hard to shoot. I remember so many times we’d only have a few minutes to set the camera because the bottom of the swamp would give way. And so, for your camera positions, you had to stage and shoot very quickly in many cases. It just was hard, and the weather was miserable. However, I will say this: If you choose to go make a movie in a swamp in the middle of winter, you probably deserve what you get. [Laughs.]

Walter Hill said the film was "not a simple action movie where the people chasing the other out there is bad":

It is clearly in a sense the kind of fault of our guys for getting into this situation. In the collective group, there are individuals who are not as highly evolved as the others. And the answers to the dilemma, I mean both nature's noblemen, those of higher character through some innate quality. And you have people that operate on a sliding scale downward to the brute level in their response to the situation that they have gotten themselves into. All of which I think is a kind of, war is terrible. It's a wartime situation. With mixed results and accompanying paranoia even by those who are the best and the brightest of the bunch... None of us are quite as good or bad as we construct them. Southern Comfort is trying not to be an easy drama.

Reception

Walter Hill later said he was "always amazed" by the reception to the film. "The American reception was a real kind of nothing. But it was very nicely received around the world."

He added that the movie "didn't make a fucking nickel anywhere. Foreign domestic, anything... I was proud of the film... But I was disappointed in the lack of response. It was a universal audience failure... Usually you can say they loved it in Japan or something. I don't think anybody loved it anywhere."

On the Rotten Tomatoes website the film has received a positive reception from critics with an overall rating of 88%. Roger Ebert rated it 3 stars, stating that it is "a film of drum-tight professionalism" but criticizing it for making its characters "into larger-than-life stick figures, into symbolic units who stand for everything except themselves." While he said that the stock nature of the characters reminded him greatly of the way Hill approached the gang members in The Warriors (which he gave a 2 stars, thumbs down review to) he also said that he would recommend Southern Comfort partly because he had overlooked good qualities of Hill's previous film over that issue, and that the atmosphere and pacing of Southern Comfort were so strong that he gave it a thumbs up. At the time critics regularly made reference to the film's plot similarities to John Boorman's 1972 thriller Deliverance.

See also

• List of American films of 1981
• Survival film, about the film genre, with a list of related films

External links

• Southern Comfort at IMDb
• Southern Comfort at AllMovie
• Southern Comfort at Rotten Tomatoes
• "Walter Hill: The Hollywood Interview" (September 8, 2009)