SCFZ poll: Walter Hill

[flip]

Sorry to keep doing this but would love an extension till tomorrow to watch The Driver.

always cool to extend the deadline, no reason to apologize! let me know when your ballot is ready

[ororama]

1. The Long Riders
2. Southern Comfort

I've seen 5 movies directed by Walter Hill, including one Tales from the Crypt episode. I may have seen one or two others, but long ago and I'm not sure.

[nrh]

watched the driver for the first time in maybe...more than ten years? for all that this gets talked about as a le samourai riff, and for all that your drives and motorways and baby drivers try to riff on the "cool" of the ryan o'neal character, this is as much bruce dern's movie as anyone else's. dern and o'neal both think of themselves as some kind of aristocracy, the city an abstract game board to play with, seemingly unconcerned with the body count and destruction that rises when their pawns don't act exactly how they want them to. less slick, less art-directed (in the '80s mann sense) than i had remembered, which here is a good thing.

[MrCarmady]

Seen 2, both good but gonna vote for

The Long Riders

And have Streets of Fire downloaded so hopefully watch one or two more before the deadline...

Seen 4.

The Long Riders
Streets of Fire

Enjoyed The Driver but it's a bit too car chase-y for me. Does this guy only make westerns disguised as different genres?

[nrh]

Does this guy only make westerns disguised as different genres?

there's a relatively well known quote where hill admits to exactly that. but i think it depends on what, exactly, you think makes a western a western once it is removed from the historical meaning of the genre.

i do think all of his films exist in this kind of abstracted narrative space, even in films like hard times or the warriors or johnny handsome where the setting seems very specific. which does put him close i think to a certain strain of western filmmaking in the '50s .

[MrCarmady]

Does this guy only make westerns disguised as different genres?

there's a relatively well known quote where hill admits to exactly that. but i think it depends on what, exactly, you think makes a western a western once it is removed from the historical meaning of the genre.

i do think all of his films exist in this kind of abstracted narrative space, even in films like hard times or the warriors or johnny handsome where the setting seems very specific. which does put him close i think to a certain strain of western filmmaking in the '50s .

I think I picked up on it especially in the two I watched for this poll - both protagonists in Streets of Fire and The Driver are these strong, mostly silent types who exist outside the law but have their own code of honour. In both of them the police only has a loose hold on law and order, similarly to some Wild West sheriffs - the hero respects them well enough but does their own thing anyway. And the love interests, such as they are, are cast aside in favour of the nomadic lifestyle. All of these are not specific to westerns but they feel like familiar western tropes to me.

[flip]

we've had a few polls like this, where one short period of a filmmaker's career dominates the top of the results, but here it's pretty extreme - of the first seven films hill made, six make up our top six, and the other, 48 Hrs, was one of his most successful at the box office:

results

1. The Warriors (1979) -- 30 pts
2. The Driver (1978) -- 28.5 pts
3. Southern Comfort (1981) -- 25.5 pts
4. The Long Riders (1980) -- 19 pts
5. Streets of Fire (1984) -- 18 pts
6. Hard Times (1975) -- 11 pts
7. Johnny Handsome (1989) -- 8 pts
8. Deadwood: "Deadwood" (2004) -- 7 pts
9. Another 48 Hrs (1990) -- 5 pts
10. Trespass (1992) -- 3 pts
10. Brewster's Millions (1985) -- 3 pts
10. 48 Hrs (1982) -- 3 pts
13. Extreme Prejudice (1987) -- 1 pt
13. Last Man Standing (1996) -- 1 pt
13. Broken Trail (2006) -- 1 pt
13. The Assignment (2016) -- 1 pt

[flip]

up at letterboxd:

https://letterboxd.com/fliptrotsky/list ... -poll-218/