Best Walter Hill Movie

(I have to admit that as directors of manly action movies go, I prefer don siegel. not to mention howard hawks. but hill was about as good as we got in the 1980s, a few films by john mctiernan aside.)

A long time ago I wrote about Extreme Prejudice for my blog.

(spielberg is good at action, but I don't really think of him as an "action director." hill started out as a stranger animal, but by the 1980s he wears the label comfortably.)

i kind of like red heat, but it doesn't feel like a walter hill movie, whatever that means. brewster's millions is probably his most uncharacteristic film and also very nearly his worst. I don't blame hill for bullet to the head btw; stallone is just a horrible presence these days, and it sounds like he really crowded hill out of a lot of the decision-making.

can we attribute hill's fallow years solely to the failure of his big westerns in the 1990s and the underperformance of stuff like johnny handsome and last man standing? (i don't count trespass and undisputed, since those were barely released.)

mostly agree with your ranking amt. 48 hours i always liked a lot more than bev hills cop

bullet to the head frankly would've been a lot better if sly didnt push wayne kramer off the picture. I thought hill did a solid job though...

i think his best moment though might be this one shock zoom in the deadwood pilot

too bad the rest of the series

great interview: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/17/walter-hill-action-movie-interview

love this guy so much, too bad he can't seem to make good movies anymore :(

I guess I need to watch 48 Hours.

The amount of hack work he wrote and/or directed is crazy: Brewster's Millions, Red Heat, Another 48 Hours, Undisputed.

he directed a couple okay movies (the Warriors, the Driver) and a lot of crap. don't get the love. He's no Don Siegel.

He's better than OK: add The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Extreme Prejudice, bits of Wild Bill (I don't get Streets of Fire.

he directed three flat-out great movies in a row: hard times, the driver, the warriors

southern comfort is near-great

48 hrs and a few others are very good

i don't really get streets of fire either, though a lot of walter hill cultists really love it

seems like a misfire to me, albeit a almost grotesquely strange one

yeah i like extreme prejudice, it's like three movies in one--for better and for worse

Streets of Fire is a cheapo MTV-indebted future shock movie with a good-looking cast.

He's no Don Siegel.

who is?

xpost

yeah i get that hill was trying to do MTV w/ streets of fire but it doesn't really come across like MTV per se, it's like hill's weird-ass version of MTV

Dan Hartman's theme song says all I need really.

also the music is terrible

haha xpost

In the last two weeks, I bought Southern Comfort and Hard Times on Blu-Ray. They look amazing, and honestly I'd forgotten just how good they are. Hard Times is black-humored and surprisingly humanistic, and Southern Comfort is one of the most tense movies of that period, and gets male group dynamics pretty much perfect.

(I have to admit that as directors of manly action movies go, I prefer don siegel. not to mention howard hawks. but hill was about as good as we got in the 1980s, a few films by john mctiernan aside.)

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, November 26, 2013 4:57 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there are some dumb plot holes/plausibility issues in southern comfort but it's mostly a brilliantly directed film... powers boothe is so good.

as far as '80s pure action directors i think mctiernan is probs the best for sure (at least stateside), unless we count james cameron i guess.

hill is right up there with them, though, as well as john carpenter though i guess he was working less in action and more in sci-fi and fantasy (as did cameron, of course.)

andrew davis had a really great run at the end of the decade; at face value code of silence and above the law look like generic action films but they're really pretty stellar gritty chicago thrillers (the package seems even more generic but is just about as good.)

honorable mention to spielberg and richard donner, since the former released the indiana jones trilogy and the latter did the first two lethal weapons.

'extreme prejudice', though, is really the ultimate overlooked '80s action flick. the central conceit of nolte facing down boothe across the border is pretty sweet but throw in the black ops CIA guys and a bank robbery and it just takes it next level. and that cast is incredible.

I tried to watch Long Riders a while back, but I didn't really like it & bailed halfway through

Driver, The Warriors, and Deadwood Pilot. Good job, Walt.

The Long Riders is so close to being great. I actually like the brothers-playing-brothers thing, I think the robberies are well staged, but there's something just slightly off about it...I think it's that he has no idea how to shoot peaceful domesticity. Anytime they're not being hunted or committing crimes, the whole thing just falls flat.

i found long riders kind of soporific. honorable, but soporific. good acting though -- keith carradine especially.

i don't know exactly what's wrong with it... maybe it feels too studied, too reverent, esp. compared with the hill films that came before it.

james cameron isn't the best when it comes to staging/shooting violence (in that respect, none of these guys can hold a flame to tsui hark or sammo hung etc.), but he's pretty great at action movie plotting and pacing... or at least he used to be.

i should add though that the car chases in the driver are some of the most beautifully edited/shot sequences in all of american cinema

that's esp. apparent on a big screen, they are captivating

i think my thing with long riders is it's real pretty to watch but the cast aren't quite up to that level. like walter either needed to dial himself down or them up. it felt like a superbly shot lifetime movie or something idk

"Studied" and "reverent" definitely get close to my problems with it. I own the DVD (also own The Driver and The Warriors, but the latter is the terrible "Ultimate Director's Cut" with all the comic-book-art inserts; I need to get the earlier Paramount DVD from eBay) and should watch it again.

There's a Japanese Region 1 Blu-Ray of Extreme Prejudice.

Got the aforementioned Japanese Blu-Ray of Extreme Prejudice in today's mail; watching it now. It looks fantastic. A totally pristine restoration, not a speck of dirt anywhere, full widescreen - totally worth the $50 it cost me (including shipping).

Charles Taylor on the grungy 1972 Hill-scripted private eye film reuniting "I Spy" stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, Hickey & Boggs:

Los Angeles looks like it’s on its last legs, the kind of decaying city where the Greyhound station would be the brightest spot in town. It’s a street-level view of the city, what you see driving or walking, not the view from the high-rises springing up round town. The partners’ office is round the back of an ancient brick building next to the rear door of a shoe store that doesn’t look as if anyone ever goes in. But no one ever seems to be anywhere in this Los Angeles. This is a noir that takes place mostly in daylight and yet, from scene to scene, it feels almost as empty as any shadowy street at night. All the locations are in rundown, nearly deserted parts of the city, an elephant’s graveyard of urban life. By the time the movie climaxes on a deserted stretch of beach, you barely notice the Pacific rolling in, and the sun shining through what looks like the only clean air in the movie. You feel as beat out as Hickey, dropping to his knees in the sand. He and Boggs seem so stunned they made it to the end of the case that they can barely take notice of the bodies all around them. They can only mutter that “nobody came … nobody cares.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/bebopsilence-hickey-boggs

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/Hickey_and_boggs_Poster.jpg

It's nice to see that one get upgraded. MGM put it out as a MOD disc a few years ago, and it looked surprisingly good, like the transfer had been meant for a proper physical release before the business changed.

Kino Lorber puts out the Blu on Dec 2... Tarantino's New Beverly in LA is showing it next week.

Walter Hill's got a new one coming soon, TOMBOY, A REVENGER'S TALE, starring Michelle Rodriguez. IMDb synopsis:

Following an ace assassin who is double crossed by gangsters and falls into the hands of rogue surgeon known as The Doctor who turns him into a woman. The hitman now a hitwoman sets out for revenge, aided by a nurse named Johnnie who also has secrets.

Wish it was Mickey Rourke in the lead.

Maron interviews:

http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-805-walter-hill

i really need to get on that Japanese region 1 blu ray of Extreme Prejudice mentioned upthread.

I've hardly seen any of this guy's films but Streets Of Fire is a really mixed bag, the hero is surrounded by better acting than he's delivering, he's excessively reckless even for the character and passes up an early opportunity to shut down the villain.
Liked the Cooder tracks, loved the Jim Steinman end song.

Had another look at The Driver... really a deadpan existential comedy when it works (80% of the time). Bruce Dern never better. Apparently Isabelle Adjani felt she made a bad choice in doingf a genre film for her first Hollywood project, and got offered only crap in the USA after it flopped.

where can you even watch The Driver?

at the Metrograph yesterday!

also the Blu released in 2013, which i've never seen. I think the Alamo video store might have it.

it's kind of shameful that Extreme Prejudice remains unaccounted for on blu-ray stateside. Shout! Factory should get on that.

XP...and the DVD is still in print and cheap (The domestic Blu is one of those OOP Twilight Time limited editions meaning $$$$)

I watched it on Blu-Ray in 2013 and the print was good.