In 1973 a squad of nine Louisiana Army National Guard soldiers convene in a local bayou for weekend maneuvers. New to the squad is Corporal Hardin, a cynical transfer from the Texas Army National Guard who is disgusted with the arrogant behavior and attitudes of the men. Happily married in civilian life, Hardin wants no part of the prostitutes which PFC Spencer has arranged but otherwise gets along with the amiable Spencer. When the squad gets disoriented in remote swampland Staff Sergeant Poole, their Vietnam War veteran squad leader, orders them to commandeer three pirogues from a campsite. A group of Cajun hunter-trappers discover the missing boats and PFC Stuckey fires blanks from his M-60 machine gun at them. The Cajuns return fire with live ammunition, killing Poole and panicking the squad.
Sgt. Casper – the strict, inexperienced, and unpopular second-in-command – orders the squad to continue their "mission." Corporal Reece's live ammunition, intended to hunt with, is distributed among the men. They encounter a one-armed Cajun hunter-trapper and Casper arrests him as a prisoner of war. The emotionally unstable Bowden attempts to burn the cabin, igniting a store of TNT inside and destroying a source of food, fresh water, guns, and ammunition. Hearing barking dogs, the Guardsmen assume they're about to be rescued but learn the Cajuns are now stalking them. The Guardsmen fend off attacking rottweillers but Cripps is killed by a lethal boobytrap that's been set for them. Bowden begins to have a serious mental breakdown in the night and is restrained. When Reece tortures the one-armed Cajun, Hardin intervenes and they fight with bayonets until Reece is killed. The one-armed Cajun escapes into the swamp. Stuckey threatens to kill Hardin until Casper promises to have Hardin court-martialed. The rest of the squad mutinies against Casper in favor of Spencer's leadership. When Stuckey dies in quicksand trying to signal a passing helicopter the two factions split up to search for him. Casper throws a homemade grenade at the Cajuns to no avail, and is killed making a bayonet charge at them. Simms is also shot and killed.
Spencer, Hardin, and a now-catatonic Bowden camp for the night and agree to fight for each other's survival. During the night Bowden is abducted and found hanging dead from a rail bridge the next morning. The one-armed Cajun appears on the tracks overhead and warns Spencer and Hardin to leave the Cajuns' territory while they still can. Following the one-armed Cajun's directions, Spencer and Hardin follow a dirt road and hitch a ride with a friendly Cajun couple who take them to a pig roast at a nearby village. The three remaining hunter-trappers arrive and Hardin is chased into a shed and wounded. Spencer intervenes, firing blanks, and Hardin stabs his attacker in the groin. Spencer leads the other two Cajuns away from the injured Hardin, disabling one with the butt of his M-16. The remaining Cajun is grabbed by Hardin and stabbed to death by Spencer.
Spencer and Hardin slip away unseen into the swamp as another helicopter arrives overhead, and when they see a U.S. Army truck drive towards them on the dirt road they realize they are finally safe.
Hill first wrote the script in 1976.[5] At one stage it was known as The Prey.[6]
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."[7]
They hired a writer, Michael Kane, to do a draft which Giler and Hill then rewrote. According to Hill, "No studio wanted to make it, but an independent production shop showed up who had a relationship with Fox. Liked it, said they would finance it."[8]
The film was financed by the Cinema Group. This was a company headed by William J. Immerman, whose head of production was Venetia Stevenson, daughter of director Robert Stevenson. The Cinema Group had raised a fund of $30million to make movies, half of which was private, the other half which was publicly raised. Southern Comfort was their second film. (Take This Job and Shove It was their first.)[1]
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.[10]
Shooting
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.'"[7]
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.
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.][11]
"It was unbelievably tough", said Powers Boothe. "The actors would clamber out of the muck just in time to get back into it. The situation was even harder on the crew. They'd set up a camera platform and it would slowly sink into the bayou. Or with a tripod, one leg would sink. And how can actors hit their marks in two feet of water?... I have to give Walter Hill credit for making the three months as endurable as possible. We didn't lose our senses of humor until late in the shooting. Taking two weeks off at Christmas time helped keep our sanity."[12]
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.[8]
Soundtrack
The music was done by Ry Cooder who had just worked with Hill on The Long Riders. Cooder later said:
Because my own musical fantasies and Walter Hill's film fantasies arc in sync, it's possible for me to score a film like Southern Comfort without understanding the first thing about its environment. All I had to do was think about this weird swamp, and the Cajun people that nobody knew about. I had to imagine what they were going to sound like, and I figured on the style of John Lee Hooker's music.[13]
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."[11]
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."[8]
On the Rotten Tomatoes website the film has received a positive reception from critics with an overall rating of 77% from 22 reviews.[14]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."[15] While he said that the stock nature of the characters reminded him greatly of the way Hill approached the gang members in The Warriors (to which he gave a 2 stars, thumbs down review) 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.
In the late 1980s Iranian state TV IRIB broadcast the film, under the name "Operation Lagoon" (Amaliyate Mordab). The film was shortened to 95 minutes, and the story was changed. In the Iranian version, a group of US Army soldiers who opposed the Vietnam War are sent on a mission among man-hunters, equipped only with blanks. The soldiers are killed by man-hunters one after another as planned by US authorities. At the end, when the remaining two soldiers believe the US Army truck is coming to save them, the picture fades and the sound of constant shooting is heard, indicating the US authorities killed all the soldiers. The film was a huge hit among the Iranian audience. Iranian film critics believed that the IRIB censored version made more sense considering the American government's atrocities overseas.[16]
1 2 Chase, Donald (14 March 1982). "THE NEW STAR PRODUCERS: THE NEW 'STAR' PRODUCERS THE NEW 'STAR' PRODUCERS". Los Angeles Times. p.K1.
↑ Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN978-0-8108-4244-1. p259
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