The Walter Hill Movie Right Before "48 HRS" -- And Nobody Remembers It

In 1982, Eddie Murphy made his screen debut -- and got instant movie stardom(after a couple of years on SNL) in the cop/convict buddy movie "48 HRS." Nick Nolte was the shambling macho star of the piece, and a most reluctant buddy, but they had chemistry and the movie surprised some Murphy TV fans with how violent and bloody it was. This was an action thriller for real..with a slice of comedy on the side.

The co-writer and director was Walter Hill, who was on a bit of a "mini-roll" in the 70's/80's cusp..making cult action films with a macho edge, from The Driver to The Warriors to The Long Riders.

Between that pack of films and "48 HRS" came: Southern Comfort.

I found this quote from Hill: "Southern Comfort's the only one of my movies that didn't make a dime ANYWHERE, around the world. Usually a movie fails ALMOST everywhere but is successful in one country, like Japan or something. But this did no business at all."

Hmmm. Hey, I went to see it at the theater when it opened, back in 1981. I was already a Walter Hill fan.

I wonder why it didn't make a dime?

The storyline is pretty easy to discern. As someone on this very board has written, "Its Deliverance meets Predator." That's about it. Deliverance without the male on male rape. Predator without a SciFi monster. It comes two years after Hill helped write "Alien" and it shares that storyline too: a group of people are picked off, one by one in an isolated location far from help. Who will survive?

As that kind of movie goes, Southern Comfort IS pretty good. A group of National Guardsmen on a weekend maneuver in the Louisiana swamp run afoul of local Cajun hunters -- and the Cajuns start hunting the Guardsmen...all through a deep murky, plant-entangled Louisiana swamp.

Possibly offputting: the men of this Guard unit include some pretty dumb, creepy specimens, at least two of whom are dangerous to their own men. There is the suggestion that this National Guard unit is a repository for some male failures...with a few "smart ones" at the mercy of their lessers.

As often happens in "men in group movies," two of the men are above the others. The team. The buddies. Here, "reluctant buddies." And not played by terribly big stars: Keith Carradine(late of The Long Riders) and Powers Boothe( a "new" male star famous for bucking a union boycott of the Emmys to pick up his award for playing psychotic political preacher Jim Jones -- risky business.)

But Carradine was at his peak of sexy handsomeness, with a smooth voice; and Powers Boothe had a voice to match his first name: powerful. And deep. We're willing to go with Carradine and Boothe as our "leaders."

Getting lost in the swamp here is almost as scary as the Deliverance men getting lost on the river, though with the sexual menace component removed, Southern Comfort becomes more of a straight action piece. The premise is that the guardsmen START everything. They steal some boats from some unseen Cajun hunters and then one of their number fires machine gun blanks AT the distant Cajuns. That does it. The Cajuns fire back -- to kill -- and the hunt is on. Cue the Vietnam/Revolutionary War analogies: our armed army men are no match for their opponents on the opponents' turf. Its a quagmire.

As always in movies like this (with "And Then There Were None" as the template, and "Alien" as the recent example from 1979 in 1981), the "fun" is waiting for who gets picked off when, and how. There is also the need(not in Deliverance) for two men amongst the Guard to fight each other to the death, and...a climax in a most unexpected location that is very suspenseful right up to the last seconds of the movie.