The looks are dangerous, aggressive, they are tactics, the transgression, that trespassing. Sometimes a single look is too much. When Bruce Willis drives into the town of Jericho, somewhere on the border with Mexico, in Walter Hill’s “Last Man Standing”, 1996, a small group of people crosses the street in front of him, he stops and looks, a young woman is among them. Immediately afterwards one of the men comes back and demolishes his car: You looked at our boss’s girl …
It’s Prohibition time, two gangs are fighting bitterly for the city, and their battles are so bitter because they all dream of the great gang wars in Chicago. Bruce Willis stays and alternates serving each other. He keeps himself upright through a narration off-screen, with the classic sentences of the noir crime thrillers. Its story has a long tradition, it comes from the Japanese film “Yojimbo” by Akira Kurosawa, which Sergio Leone had already used as a template. This is a long way from “Driver”, the cool silent hero in Hill’s second film, Ryan O’Neal, whom many critics saw in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson.
Walter Hill is the last Hollywood action master to explore the relationships between character and action. He was assistant director on Woody Allen’s “Take the Money And Run” and on “Thomas Crown” and “Bullitt”, and then wrote the screenplay for Steve McQueen for “The Getaway” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur /. “Last Man Standing” is a later Walter Hill film, the hero is without principles, that leads action cinema into the absurd, to the limit of the cynical.
The genre has changed in the years since Hill was a director, in the late seventies and early eighties, made more subversive by the Vietnam War and the trauma he produced in America. Walter Hill has always addressed this, unlike the playful John Carpenter, who at the same time revitalized genre cinema, with great success. Hill has always pushed opposites to extremes, which has never harmed the genre. In “The Assignment” he stabbed the wasp’s nest of gender when a hit man was turned into a woman by an operation.
His characters have to assert themselves – on unfamiliar terrain
Walter Hill never left America for his stories – with the exception of the screwed up “Supernova”, which Coppola also tinkered with – but he sent his heroes to different regions of the country, on unfamiliar missions, on strange terrain. And often they do the most themselves to ensure that it remains a stranger to them. The gangs of New York who have to fight their way through the whole city in “The Warriors”, the men of the National Guard in the Cajun swamps of Louisiana in “Southern Comfort”, the young veterans in the border country to Mexico in “Extreme Prejudice”.
The spaceship crew in “Alien”, for which Hill wrote the script with David Giler and which he was initially supposed to direct, remains particularly strange in their environment – Ridley Scott ultimately took over the direction. The bunch of hapless nagging technicians on the filthy Nostromo space freighter who fell victim to capitalist corporate politics. Hill was producer at the end of the film, for the script, he didn’t get any credit. I usually duck, he said, when it comes to “alien”.
Walter Hill loves the chicks, the underdogs who only live from their resignation. Studying his films decades in advance, a country that would ultimately freeze in the bitter Trump chaos. In “Just 48 Hours”, 1988, cop Nick Nolte has to work with black convict Eddie Murphy on a mission where every second counts. Which, when he pretended to be a police officer, brutally sums up a redneck: “I’m your biggest nightmare, a nigger with a badge.” Clint Eastwood had been interested in the project, but he wanted to play the convict, not the cop.
The aggression of looks, that is the material from which Walter Hill makes his films. Glances replace the actions. In “The Warriors” the boy and the girl he met that night sit tired, sweaty, dirty, and battered in the subway on the way back to Coney Island. Two yuppie couples get in, very chic, flirtatious, full of disdain. The girl, embarrassed, brushes a strand from her face, the boy stops her movement, he gazes into space, silent and motionless. A wonderful dignity emanates from him.