Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort is a tense, spare survival thriller with an oppressive swamp setting and a strong ensemble. Its soldiers can be thinly drawn, but the fear is hard to shake.
Southern Comfort gets considerable suspense out of a simple difficulty: being lost with people whose judgement cannot be trusted. Walter Hill puts ill-trained National Guardsmen into the Louisiana bayou, where a clash with Cajun hunters exposes how poorly prepared they are. It is a forceful, frightening thriller, though several of the men remain too thinly drawn. The danger of the swamp is compounded by the possibility that a companion will make everything worse.
Andrew Laszlo’s cinematography makes the misty bayou difficult to read: the men occupy the image without seeming to understand the space around them. Looking into the distance offers no useful sense of where to go. We felt trapped by those views of the swamp. The fear comes from being unable to see a clear route through the place, even when there is nobody visibly blocking the way. John Vallone’s production design is unobtrusive enough to let the water, trees and mist dominate.
Keith Carradine as Spencer, Powers Boothe as Hardin and Fred Ward as Reece give the group enough human weight to keep the pursuit from becoming a sequence of exercises in suspense. The ensemble is persuasive at showing how fear makes these men worse company for one another. We spend much of the film looking for evidence of judgement and getting aggression instead. That is a useful way to unsettle an audience: even a pause in the hunting offers little prospect of rest.
The screenplay by Walter Hill, Michael Kane and David Giler is less convincing when it needs to establish who the soldiers might be outside this predicament. Some are assigned a failing and left to demonstrate it. We can too often guess the kind of mistake a man will make before he makes it. That predictability takes a little force out of the pursuit. The actors keep the group watchable, but they cannot supply everything the writing leaves out.
As a military thriller, the film does something useful with the expectation that training and comradeship will get people through. Here, the lack of dependable leadership makes being part of a unit another reason to worry. The Vietnam reading is readily available in the spectacle of armed Americans mishandling an encounter with local people on unfamiliar ground. We need no elaborate explanation of the parallel, and the film is most persuasive when it lets us watch the men struggle rather than asking us to consider what each might represent.
Freeman A. Davies’s editing gives the group’s friction enough room to matter between the threats from outside. That helps the suspense: we have to sit with men who cannot agree on how to behave. Ry Cooder’s eerie score offers no reassurance, making even the stretches between action uncomfortable. It suits the grey bayou better than any rousing military accompaniment could. Do not choose it as a way of winding down.
