Walter Hill – Intellect, Influence And Action

Up until recently when it was announced he would direct a new action thriller featuring Sylvester Stallone and Christian Slater, things have been rather quiet on the Walter Hill front. Despite winning an Emmy in 2004 for directing the pilot episode of HBO western Deadwood, the veteran director’s last features were the underrated boxing drama Undisputed and 2000’s outer-space turkey, Supernova.

Hill was so unhappy with the result and the experience that he had his name removed from the picture, and was credited instead as Thomas Lee (the regular pseudonym for unhappy directors, Alan Smithee, was discontinued earlier that year).

The situation was not always so bleak. After beginning his career as an assistant director and screenwriter (he penned The Getaway, and worked on Alien) Hill hit his directing peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s. His raison d’etre was creating tense, existential action thrillers, stripping his characters down to their bare bones and delving for the bleak, almost exclusively masculine heart of the situation.

With lean efforts such as Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors and Southern Comfort, Hill displayed a canny knack for creating atmosphere, a talent for composing sequences of stylised, explosive violence and crucially, he brought a rare intellect and steeliness to the action movie genre.

Despite the numerous gleaming triumphs on his CV, however, Hill has never quite attained the legendary status bestowed upon contemporaries such as Sam Peckinpah or predecessors like Howard Hawks. There are a few possible reasons for this. Firstly, Hill’s preference for low-key grit and an almost European sensibility in the face of growing demand for big-budget pyrotechnics may have counted against him.

It could also be argued that, in juggling more esoteric fare with mainstream generic diversions like Richard Pryor laugh-a-thon Brewster’s Millions, he watered down his ‘auteurism’. Another, more prosaic reason is simply that Hill’s track record was less than consistent, and he suffered a notable dip in form from the mid-’80s onwards.

Muscular macho-fests like Extreme Prejudice, despite featuring the most hilariously masculine cast of all-time (Nick Nolte, Michael Ironside, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown, Powers Boothe and ex-WWE wrestler Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister) were no more than solidly entertaining, while fare such as the Schwarzenegger Soviet soiree Red Heat fell flat. Worse still, the lamentable 48 Hrs. re-tread Another 48 Hrs. made Gus Van Sant’s Psycho look vital by comparison. In the ’90s, Hill’s stock fell further, although many have pointed to Geronimo as an example of a lost classic.

While the man himself may have been out of the public eye, there are certainly signs that his influence is now being felt amongst a younger generation of filmmakers.

The clearest example of this, in look and feel alone, can be witnessed in Drive, the new film from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Ryan Gosling as an implacable stuntman moonlighting as a getaway driver, Drive picked up the Best Director award at Cannes, and looks set to be a major hit upon its release on September 23.

Although Refn has cited Bullitt (upon which Hill worked as an uncredited assistant director) as the film’s primary reference point, the similarities with Hill’s The Driver are unmistakable. A nameless, taciturn anti-hero (both coincidentally played by actors with the first name Ryan – O’Neal in the case of The Driver)? Check. Tense, dialogue-free chase sequences? Check. Burnished, neon-lit LA backstreets? Check. The pared-down vibe, and explosive bursts of controlled violence hark back to peak Hill, skirting the borders of exploitation, drilling down to the bare essentials of plot and character.

Another influential film from the Hill canon is his masterpiece (30 years old this year), the aforementioned Southern Comfort. Often compared to John Boorman’s thematically similar Deliverance (the film’s original theatrical poster referenced the film in a rather obvious marketing ploy), Southern Comfort is the richer of the two; a relentlessly suspenseful thriller in which a group of ill-disciplined Louisiana National Guardsmen find themselves under attack from enraged local Cajuns. Southern Comfort works equally brilliantly as a piercing critique of US involvement in Vietnam, a tense, unsparingly violent chase and also as a piercing examination of the masculine group dynamic under intense pressure.

Kelly Reichardt’s sparse neo-western Meek’s Cutoff is a direct descendent of Southern Comfort-era Hill, both in the way that we are plunged directly into the elemental nature of the situation and characters without a formal introduction, and the manner in which the tension is ratcheted up slowly, leading into an ambiguous finale, all the while commenting on the vagaries of American expansionism with understatement and critical detachment.

Southern Comfort features an almost unbearably tense denoument as the two remaining survivors (played by Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine) find themselves all at sea in the middle of a Cajun dance party. Similarly, Reichardt fosters a creeping sense of unease as her band of travellers venture tentatively through unfamiliar terrain.

Throughout his filmmaking life, Hill has affiliated himself with the Western, directing straight westerns (The Long Riders, Last Man Standing amongst others), and imbuing other films with the core elements of that particular genre. He has been been quoted as saying, “[the western] is ultimately a stripped down moral universe that is, whatever the dramatic problems are, beyond the normal avenues of social control … of the problem, and I like to do that even within contemporary stories.” In this context, his vital, almost skeletal cinematic influence can clearly be detected in sombre adaptations of Cormac McCarthy novels No Country For Old Men and The Road.

Hopefully, the likes of Drive will inspire Hill novices to investigate the rich oeuvre of this underappreciated director, and inspire future directors to channel his determination to bring a sorely-missed degree of intellect and reserve back to action-led Hollywood cinema.

To see a screaming Jason Statham somersaulting from a fifth-floor window tied to a chair (in the trailer for the upcoming Killer Elite), or the farcical exertions of The Expendables, really is a painful experience. Perhaps, with the Stallone/Slater film, Hill can get back on form and do it himself. Here’s hoping.

Walter Hill – Intellect, Influence And Action (text) by Ashley Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.