Walter Hill month: Southern Comfort

A review by Brooks Rich

Walter Hill has made a lot of films about men. Masculinity, both its good and its bad sides, is a recurrent theme in his films. Sometimes Hill praises the masculine, sometimes he shows how being overly masculine can lead to someone's downfall. Both of these looks at masculinity can be found in his forgotten 1981 thriller, Southern Comfort. 

A squad of National Guardsmen are doing a training exercise in the swamps of Louisiana. They get lost and decide to borrow some canoes they find, which turn out belong to four Cajun men who lived deep in the swamp. A miscommunication occurs between the guardsmen and the Cajuns and one of the guardsmen starts firing blanks at the Cajuns. This leads to a firefight where the head of the guardsmen is killed. The remaining guardsmen are then stalked through the swamp, battling both their adversaries and each other. 

The catalyst for everything that happens is a display of machismo – a little man with a big gun who wants to show he's the bigger man to people he thinks are beneath him. As the situation gets more out of hand, you see the tough guys devolve into cowardice and fear and the real men step forward. The real enemy for most of the film is the mistrust the men have with each other and the desire to be tougher than the guy next to him. Hill takes a hard look at toxic masculinity, showing it sew dissent in the ranks. For most of the film the Cajuns are on the outskirts of the story, really only becoming a major threat in the third act. 

Hill's characters, especially his tough guys and the characters who are supposed to be the protagonists, sometimes don't say much in his films. A previous film mentioned this month was The Driver, where Ryan O’Neal's getaway driver says very little during the course of the film. Here Powers Boothe's character Hardin is the strong but silent type, choosing his words carefully, only speaking up when the other men are turning on each other. In reverse, the men who talk a lot are often the heels, the untrustworthy individuals who talk to weasel themselves out of situation. We'll discuss this idea more when we cover Hard Time's, Hill's first movie. 

Southern Comfort is a down and dirty film. It's not a pleasant watch and the kills are brutal. I've heard some critics call it a lame slasher-wannabe, but I disagree with that. There's more to it than that. The kills aren't fun. They're brutal and real. There's a realness to this movie. If you can stomach violence, give this watch.