Semiquincentennial Movie Project #18: Southern Comfort

 

 

 

The Semiquincentennial  Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).

Week #18: Louisiana -

 

 

 

The state of Louisiana was established on April 30, 1812. 

Details about Louisiana:

State bird: eastern brown pelican

State flower: magnolia    

State tree: bald cypress

Additional historical trivia:

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway holds the record for being the longest bridge in the U.S., at 24 miles. (Note: Your blogger has crossed that bridge... it seems even longer... there are telephone stations every mile or two in case you break down).

The Battle of New Orleans, the last battle fought in the Civil War, actually occurred after the South had surrendered.

The nation's tallest state capitol building is located in Louisiana.

It's illegal to send a pizza to someone without their consent in Louisiana. (You can send it to me, if I happen to be there... I won't press charges...)

St. Joseph's Cemetery in Rayne is the only cemetery where the graves are aligned north to south instead of east to west.

The first opera every performed in the U.S. happened in Louisiana.

Famous people born in Louisiana: Reese Witherspoon, Ellen DeGeneres, Louis Armstrong, Terry Bradshaw, Peyton and Eli Manning and Jimmy Swaggart,  

 

Southern Comfort (1981): 

John Carpenter and Walter Hill rank #1 and #2, respectively, as my favorite directors. Both Carpenter's and Hill's films occupy several several of the top movies in my list of all time favorites. as well as being the focus of a number of reviews here on The Midnite Drive-In. Carpenter is my go-to guy for horror and Hill is the same for taut action and character driven movies.

As far as Walter Hill is concerned, The Warriors, Streets of Fire and Crossroads have previously been addressed, and with today's feature, Southern Comfort, I am including one that I think sometimes may be neglected in his oeuvre. Most people will recognize such titles as the two Eddie Murphy / Nick Nolte films, 48 Hours and Another 48 Hours. I would hope that a lot of people would know about The Warriors, too, but that's just because it is the one that got my attention. Possibly some of you may even remember the Richard Pryor comedy from 1985, Brewster's Millions, which was not an action movie, but was still entertaining.

Southern Comfort comes off as something like the Burt Reynolds film Deliverance on steroids. The parallels between the two films is interesting. Both involve characters who are "strangers in a strange land" of sorts. Both have our central characters struggling to survive in the wilderness as natives to the area try to hunt them down. In both cases the main characters have engendered an enmity with the locals through some faux pas and are now being summarily hunted down.

In Southern Comfort what we have is a squad of Louisiana National Guard soldiers on maneuvers in the backwoods swamps of Louisiana. The setting is 1973. There are many reviews of the film that make this film out to be an allegory for America's involvement in Vietnam, but the director himself insists that was not the case. One reviewer I read said that Hill has a point. The negative egotism that Americans had about the "less civilized" Vietcong during that war was not unique to just Vietnam.

I personally think that Southern Comfort was just a natural progression of the same theme that Hill had used in his previous film, The Warriors, which involved a band of gang members caught behind enemy lines and just trying to survive long enough to make it to safety. There is the added feature that not all of the members of this squad of soldiers are all on the same page. This may or may not be related to the fact that these soldiers are basically just "weekend warriors". Admittedly that's a rather negative and derogatory term for National Guard troops, but one that I come by honestly, since I have personally known a few Guard  soldiers, and many of them viewed themselves as such.

Anyway, what happens is that the leader of the troop, Sgt. Poole (Peter Coyote), gets the troop lost because the map he has is not entirely accurate, due to the changing nature of the swamps. 

 

When they find themselves facing a path that is now underwater, even though the map says the land is clear, a decision is made to commandeer a few canoes (shades of Deliverance!) that belong to the locals. They leave a note saying they will be returned, since those locals are not present at the moment.

 The situation becomes a bit more dire when the soldiers see the natives and one of the soldiers, obviously not very sympathetic to these backwoods hillbillies, fires off a few shots at them. They are only equipped with blanks, not real bullets, so no damage was going to happen to them, but the natives take issue anyway. One of them fires a real bullet and takes out Poole.

Sgt. Casper (Les Lannom) takes charge, but his command is something similar to some of the in charge characters in those Vietnam movies; everything strictly by the book, including hauling the dead body of their comrade. 

 

But infighting is bound to naturally occur. Hence the character driven portion of which I spoke earlier. Among the fellow soldiers is Corporal Reece (Fred Ward), who has smuggled in some live rounds into the maneuvers. Casper, upon finding out about this, orders that Reece split the rounds between all of the soldiers, much to Reece's dismay.

 

Private Spencer (Keith Carradine) and Corporal Hardin (Powers Boothe) and the remaining squad then begin the trek to find their way out of the swamp. 

 

Meanwhile the vindictive natives have begun a quest to take out the squad. Being that they know the lay of the land quite a bit better than the interlopers, this comes off  as pretty much a foregone conclusion. Booby traps (and in one case, quicksand) one by one eliminate many of the soldiers.

 

The whole thing comes to a head when Spencer and Hardin, now the only remaining survivors, find themselves supposedly rescued and taken to "safety" of a nearby village. But the hillbillies find them, and the whole thing comes to a head. While the townspeople seem somewhat oblivious to what is happening, both Spencer and Hardin find themselves facing off against the remainder of their enemies. 

 

Among the recognizable faces in the band of soldiers is T.K. Carter, who played Nauls in The Thing and had a part in one segment of Amazon Women on the Moon. Lewis Smith played Perfect Tommy in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, as well as the guardian angel of the main character in The Heavenly Kid (which is still waiting for a screening on The Midnite Drive-In...)  Franklyn Seales might also be memorable; he was Dexter on the TV series Silver Spoons.

The film was a failure at the box office. It had a budget of $7.5 million, but only pulled in a little under $3 million in ticket sales. (My movie $$ were not a part of it... I first saw it when it came to Showtime in 1982.) However, it was fairly well received by the critics. It holds a 79% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert gave it 3 stars, although that was primarily for the plotting and direction. He criticized the characters as being not much more than "stick-figure" characters.

It seems, on retrospect, that I am not the only person to note the similarities to Deliverance. According to the wikipedia article on the film (which I read AFTER having written the opening to this review), "[a]t the time critics regularly made reference to the film's plot similarities to John Boorman's 1972 thriller Deliverance".

I personally think the Burt Reynolds movie is much better, but I still like this film. It has enough action to hold interest, even if the characters are a bit cardboard. None of them really stand out as memorable, although I can really empathize with the Boothe  character; a man after my own heart, not very receptive to any BS, just wanting to get the job done and go back home to his wife and family. (One scene has him reacting negatively to a fellow soldier's plan to have a bevy of "female companions" waiting for them at the end of the maneuvers...)

Well, folks, that wraps up this trip down to Bayou Country. Drive safely.

Quiggy