Southern Comfort
Short description
A Louisiana National Guard unit heads into the bayou for a weekend training exercise. The men are bored with routine duty and eager to get the drill over with, so they take some canoes belonging to the local Cajun hunters to reach their rally point faster. When the owners confront them, one soldier fires blanks as a provocation. The gesture is misunderstood, shots are returned, and the squad finds itself hunted through unfamiliar marshland by people who know every inch of the terrain. Short on live ammunition and cut off from help, the soldiers turn on one another as much as they fight back.
Walter Hill directed, working from a screenplay he wrote with David Giler and Michael Kane, with Giler producing. It was Hill's fifth film as director, following The Long Riders in 1980 and preceding 48 Hrs. in 1982. Keith Carradine plays Spencer and Powers Boothe plays Hardin, the two men who emerge as the unit's uneasy leaders; Fred Ward, Franklyn Seales, T.K. Carter and Lewis Smith are among the squad. The production credits 25 cast members and 69 crew.
Released in September 1981, the film took in about 5 million dollars worldwide, a modest return. On IMDb it holds 7.1 out of 10 from roughly 24,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.8 from around 370 votes. A critics' rating of 7.1 from 24 reviews puts professional assessment in line with the larger audience sample.
What's left behind the scenes
- Contrary to urban legends, the idea for the film is entirely fictional and not based on any reliably known clashes between the National Guard and Cajuns (an ethnic group predominantly represented in the southern part of Louisiana and in adjacent counties of South Texas).
- This is a film with a so-called collective hero, meaning that 9 people act as the positive protagonist, functioning more or less as one. Screenwriter and director Walter Hill frequently used this technique – for example, in the film 'The Warriors' (1979) and in the western 'The Long Riders' (1980).
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