Sherry Chandler

Southern Comfort

[This post contains spoilers.]

During the years between his 1960s blues guitar work with the likes of Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart and his controversial 1990s work with the Buena Vista Social Club, Ry Cooder did a bunch of soundtracks, including several for Walter Hill. Which explains why Hill’s 1981 film Southern Comfort was our latest Netflix adventure.

The movie, which bills itself as Deliverance in the bayou, is more engaging than I had expected, with decent performances all round but notably by Keith Carradine and Powers Booth as the only two intelligent Guardsmen in a squad of nine sent out for a weekend war game in the swamps. Peter Coyote got killed in the first ten minutes, which may have been a blessing considering the quality of his southern accent. Wikipedia describes the movie, aptly enough, as “a not altogether subtle critical allegory of US military presence in Viet Nam,” but for us it had more in common with the last-man-standing suspense of certain horror movies. (It has also been compared to the 1987 Predator, but I see Alien.)

As with most horror movies, it’s fairly obvious who’s expendable (hint: the black guys never make it out) and who is going to be the last man standing (hint: cherchez le blond), so the fun lies in watching the clever ways the lurking enemy manages to pick the Guardsmen off one by one. In this case the enemy is bayou Cajuns. The Guardsmen are stupid enough to steal some pirogues early on and continue, Deliverance style, to escalate their stupidity throughout the movie.

Hill and his co-writer Michael Kane deliver enough suspense with their cast of stock characters to make the movie watchable without being really intense. The film is most remarkable for its cinematography, its soundtrack, and what seemed to us its strong predictions of a couple of Jim Jarmusch movies: the 1986 Down by Law and 1995 Dead Man.

Down by Law, which Tom Lutz lists in Doing Nothing as one of the great Slacker movies, is shot in black & white but its use of the swamps is somehow very similar to this color work by Hill. I suppose there are only so many things you can do with a bunch of utter tyros being pursued through the swamp. And of course, Down by Law is utterly hip and ironic (with a completely charming performance by Roberto Benigni) while, as far as I could tell, Southern Comfort takes itself straight.

I am too ignorant of cinematography to comment much, but in clicking around in IMDb and Wikipedia I do see a sort of link in cinematographer Robby Müller, who worked on two Wim Wenders films for which Cooder did the soundtrack (including Buena Vista Social Club) and also on Down by Law and Dead Man. But no connection to Walter Hill that I see right away.

Cooder’s sound track though must surely have influenced Neil Young’s work on Dead Man, which is one of my favorite movies. I suppose you could also argue that there’s only so much one can do with an electric guitar but the very idea of using a solo guitar as a soundtrack is rare, and the use of distortion and silence are very similar. The primary difference is that Cooder’s work is very restrained whereas the Young soundtrack is, effectively, so palpable as to be another character in the film.

The last ten minutes or so of Southern Comfort take place in the midst of a Cajun barbecue/dance, giving Cooder an opportunity to spotlight his long-standing interest in American roots music. It’s a delightful play of the jaunty music and exuberant dancing against the inevitable final violent confrontation. Unfortunately, at this point, the music overpowers the film. But it’s great music.

Possibly related posts:

The sociology of the Netflix queue

Southern Movies

The Long Riders

Paris, Texas

T R Williams at Southern Artistry

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