Although on the surface there are plot similarities to John Boorman’s survivalist allegory Deliverance (acknowledged as a classic in American cinema), Southern Comfort is just as effective, skillful and individual in its own right and has gradually begun to be treated as an equal to the better-known film – such is Hill’s strength here that Southern Comfort’s critical reputation should increase over time. Indeed, it is the militarist allegory within the film that ensures its potency and historical interest. Hill depicts the squad as arrogant, cocky and half-hearted soldiers more concerned with having a good time than with respecting either the land or its inhabitants. Many of them have no regard for the local Cajuns whatsoever; although in time they grow to fear them. With their leader gone, this tight-knit military unit collapses, slowly disintegrating, their petty rivalries taking over. American military pride is shown to be easily out-smarted, those who survive doing so both because of their wits and their realization of the lesson in humility given them by the very people they underestimate and humiliate – they are forced to fear and respect their enemy. Therein lies the horror of Vietnam allegory – that a bunch of essentially weekend warriors were sent into a terrain they knew little about and amidst a community they felt inherently superior to, eventually finding that their innate arrogance threatened to get them lost and killed.
Expertly directed so that character emerges out of action and through attitude, Hill brings out the individuality of each squad member and then charts how they react to unexpected pressures. Stress determines the strength of personality and what selfish, cocky individuals may truly be capable of. In part like his other films about groups under stress, the context is one of protracted collapse and manages a wicked sense of irony as the more lost in the swamp the characters become. Thus, it intertwines group and individual disintegration, the journey motif providing a link especially to Hill’s superb modern urban myth of The Warriors. The men in Southern Comfort are measured against each other in terms of how they react to the very military ethos (and camaraderie) that seems to have them entrapped in arrogance. By the book militarism simply has no place as their struggle for survival also potentially becomes a recovery of a lost humanism, at least for Carradine. Rarely has the study of group dynamics been as forceful or as gripping as it is here. With a lean plot, genuinely involving characterization and supreme craftsmanship, Southern Comfort is an astonishingly realized movie. How it has remained a minor work in the two decades since its release is simply bewildering. As action movies go, Southern Comfort shows what the genre can be capable of as action, character study and thematic treatise. read more
Wider Screenings DVD Attractions: Theme from Southern Comfort by Ry Cooder
(courtesy of YouTube embedded video)