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Southern Comfort on DVD (1981)
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Radio Times
In this action drama, nine National Guardsmen — including Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe — are sent on exercises through the Louisiana swamplands and find themselves drawn into a guerrilla war with the local Cajuns. Set in 1973, Walter Hill's movie is evidently an allegorical treatment of the Vietnam conflict, with the Cajuns cast as the shadowy but lethal Vietcong. But the film's political impulse never amounts to a statement and is in fact a red herring; Southern Comfort should be sipped as American Gothic. Few movies are as single-minded as this one: Hill establishes the bayou as a grey, formless labyrinth and ultimately creates a purely abstract action movie that's creepy, tense and never remotely comfortable. Sight and Sound "...Hill provides a reassuring reminder of the popular cinema's continuing capacity for relevant self-renewal....An unshowy originality that conveys a bracing shock of pleasure..."
Brilliant, compelling, tightly-constructed thriller that manages also to be an allegory of American involvement in Vietnam. Members ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
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