Walter Hill makes spare thrillers about men who distrust one another but have a job to finish. We value his tense, unsentimental action, though he too often gives the people doing the fighting too little personality.
Fi1m perspective
In 48 Hrs. (1982), Eddie Murphy takes a borrowed badge into a hostile country bar and talks as though nobody there can touch him. We laughed, then felt a chill, because Murphy makes that borrowed authority frightening as well as funny. Hill lets him talk, an unusually generous allowance from a director whose men generally say only what the job requires. The plot is thin and the racial abuse has dated badly, but Hill refuses to make either his detective or his convict lovable, which keeps their partnership interesting.
After his first feature, Hard Times (1975), the gang pursuit of The Warriors (1979) helped establish his lean, heightened style. His model was the Western, even when the setting was contemporary. In Southern Comfort (1981), ill-trained National Guardsmen in the Louisiana bayou have as much reason to fear one another's judgement as the Cajun hunters. Hill makes the swamp oppressive and the group's mistakes consequential, though the screenplay he shares with Michael Kane and David Giler gives some soldiers little beyond a fault to demonstrate.
That economy has limits. Another 48 Hrs. (1990) still has Murphy and Nick Nolte working well together, but Hill crowds their comedy out with a hurried crime plot and repeated violence. It feels rushed when something needs explaining and slow when somebody might get hurt. His screenplay work on Alien³ (1992) shows a related problem. The script he shares with Larry Ferguson and Giler gives us too few distinct prisoners for the shouted names to mean much.
His direction of the Deadwood (2004) pilot brought him back to period Western territory. We admire the series for making the struggle to live together as absorbing as the violence, though its achievement cannot all be credited to Hill. Its elaborate speeches can be excessive, but nobody could accuse it of having too little to say. Start with Southern Comfort if a few sketchily written soldiers will not spoil an evening of sustained unease.
Biography
Walter Hill is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 10 January 1942 in Long Beach, California, he studied at Mexico City College and Michigan State University. He began working in film as a second assistant director in 1967 and has directed, written and produced films since the mid-1970s.
Hill is known for action films including The Warriors (1979), which he directed and co-wrote, and 48 Hrs. (1982), which he directed. He has maintained a long association with the Alien franchise, serving as producer on Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Romulus (2024), and contributing to the stories or screenplays for Aliens (1986) and Alien³ (1992).
