Walter Hill may not be back in the saddle, but he’s back in the movies again.
That’s because the soon-to-be-72-year-old writer-director has Bullet to the Head, his first movie to open in theaters since the Wesley Snipes/Ving Rhames boxing yarn Undisputed was issued in 2002.
The new effort stars Sylvester Stallone as a hitman named Johnny Bobo (we’re not kidding!) who joins forces with former Korean cop Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang of Fast Five) in order to find the person who’s killed Bobo’s partner and is attempting to assassinate Kwon.
Early reviews of the project claim it’s a return to 48 Hrs. buddy-cop form for the once-prolific macho action specialist. (Hill did not pen the screenplay, which is based on a graphic novel.) Though it’s been ten years since Undisputed, Hill’s semi-retirement has been anything but basking in the sun on the beach.
Among his credits in recent years: serving as director and producer on the acclaimed AMC Western miniseries Broken Trail, starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church; producing the HBO series Deadwood; reworking his gang picture The Warriors for DVD release, much to the chagrin of purists; and, serving as co-producer on the Alien Vs. Predator films and Prometheus. (Hill produced and contributed to the script to the original Alien, which he was set to direct before Ridley Scott took over.)
The first screenwriting credit for Hill, a Long Beach, California native who was an assistant director on the Steve McQueen-starrers The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, came with 1972’s Hickey & Boggs, a gritty contemporary noir directed by Robert Culp that teamed the actor with his I Spy co-star Bill Cosby. They play down-on-their luck private investigators who encounter stolen loot and mobsters when they try to track down a lawyer’s missing daughter.
This sadly neglected crime saga was followed later the same year by Hill’s stylish adaption of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway for violence auteur Sam Peckinpah, a filmmaker Hill has often been likened to during his career. Hill’s slam-bang, irony-filled screenplay helped make The Getaway a solid hit for the director and its stars, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw.
The Getaway’s popularity also brought Hill some plum screenwriting assignments for its releasing studio, Warner Brothers. There was the easy-going sophisticated heist farce The Thief Who Came to Dinner with Ryan O’Neal, and two Paul Newman vehicles, The Mackintosh Man and the Harper sequel The Drowning Pool.
James Coburn and Charles Bronson in Hard Times (1975)
Hill eventually got a chance to direct in 1975 with Hard Times, an atmospheric period yarn positing Charles Bronson as a bare-knuckled boxer and James Coburn as his slick promoter in Depression-era New Orleans. Even though the film has several hard-hitting boxing sequences that Peckinpah would have been proud of, the film also takes its time exploring the Crescent City turf, as well as the enigmatic Bronson’s relationships with Coburn and with the fighter’s girlfriend (played by real-life wife Jill Ireland). Many Bronson fans consider it one of the actor’s finest performances.
But Hill certainly amped things up with his next few projects. 1978’s The Driver stars Ryan O’Neal as an unnamed getaway wheelman pursued by arrogant cop Bruce Dern, who calls him a “cowboy.” The film is a stylish affair, noirish in approach, that showcases classic screen car chases, minimalist plot, and even characterization. No wonder director Nicholas Winding Refn cited it as a major influence on his Ryan Gosling starrer Drive. Certainly, Hill’s work on the car-chase classic Bullitt played a part in the final result here.
Though The Driver sputtered at the box-office, 1979’s The Warriors, a loose adaptation of Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel and the Greek legend of Anabais, became something of a surprise box-office hit and, in some ways, a cultural phenomenon. The edgy, stylized effort, propelled by Joe Walsh’s “In the City” on the soundtrack, centers on a Bronx-centered powwow attended by the Big Apple’s most dangerous–and colorful—gangs, including the Coney Island-based Warriors. After Cyrus, the thugs’ keynote speaker, is shot, the Warriors get blamed for the deed, and must figure out a way to elude the other factions of theme-attired hoods in order to get across NYC to the safety of their home turf.
While the film ultimately proved popular, taking in over $22 million on a tight budget, real-life gangs patronized the film, prompting stabbings and shootings in theaters around the country during its opening days. Paramount, its distributor, pulled TV and radio ads after the first week to calm nervous theater owners, which didn’t bode well for future box-office returns. While the film received mixed reviews, it did have its share of prominent fans.
For example, Pauline Kael, the most influential film critic of the time, wrote in The New Yorker: “With Walter Hill’s The Warriors, movies are back to their socially conscious role of expressing the anger of the dispossessed…Paramount opened the picture in six hundred and seventy theatres, without advance press screenings, promoting it as an exploitation film, via a thumping TV commercial. Probably the assumption was that the audience for this picture doesn’t read reviews. But the literate shouldn’t miss out on it. The Warriors is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that “Rock Around The Clock” did behind the titles of “Blackboard Jungle.”
Over the years, the film has gathered a large cult following. In 2005, Hill even went back to the drawing board for an “ultimate director’s cut,” adding narration to the beginning of the film (Orson Welles was once slated to provide it for the original version). The director also supervised the use of transitional panels to link scenes, and added zooms and freeze frames — comic book additions that angered the film’s most fervid fans. This new edition remains the only one currently available on DVD and Blu-ray.
The essence of Hill’s work may best be defined in an interview he did for the compilation Backstory 4, in which he discussed the impact reading the script for John Boorman’s classic thriller Point Blank had for him. He found it different than other scripts because it was “Laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style.” Hill has labeled his brand of own writing and direction “Haiku-like.” Others have called it “economic.”
After The Warriors, Hill, a self-admitted devotee of westerns and crime novels, had wanted to direct a sagebrusher, and he got his wish with 1980’s The Long Riders, an unusual idiosyncratic oater in which the helmer cast the brothers Carradine, Keach, Quaid and Guest, respectively, as the Youngers, the Jameses, the Millers, and the Fords. With a high level of violence (much of it slow-mo Peckinpah style), an often convoluted plot that criss-crossed deceit and secret intentions, and some stunning photography and impressive set pieces (“The Northfield Minnesota Raid” is staged memorably), The Long Riders interested, but didn’t really captivate, general audiences or fans of classic westerns. It did, however, introduce the music of Ry Cooder to the Hill canon, a fruitful collaboration between director and talented composer that lasted decades.
While Hill has gone on record as saying he views all his films as westerns of one sort or another, he’s made only made two genuine oaters since The Long Riders, and back-to-back at that. Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) takes a revisionist look at the Native-American warrior’s struggles with the U.S. government, who ignored the promises they made to Geronimo (Wes Studi) and the Apache people. The expensive production had an impressive cast that includes Matt Damon (in his first starring role, as the film’s narrator), Gene Hackman, Jason Patric and Robert Duvall. Based on a script originally penned by John Milius (Apocalypse Now!), the film failed to click with audiences and was a box-office dud.
Wild Bill (1999), another expensive box-office disappointment, offered Jeff Bridges as “Wild Bill” Hickock, the famous buffalo hunter, scout and gunslinging lawman. The aging Hickock is portrayed as a burned-out hero who can’t shake his love for drink, women or hellraising. Partially based on the book Deadwood by Pete Dexter (Paris Trout), the film focuses on Hickock’s later years in Deadwood, South Dakota; like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, it often views his life though an opium haze. John Hurt plays his friend and narrator of the piece, while Ellen Barkin (as Calamity Jane), Diane Lane and Christina Applegate are the women in his life.
Of course, Hill would later revisit Deadwood with the highly acclaimed HBO series of the same name, featuring Keith Carradine as Hickock. Hill produced the David Milch-created series and directed the pilot episode.
In addition to the “pure” westerns, there are Hill’s “pseudo-westerns,” more contemporary films that play like westerns. The Louisiana bayou-set Southern Comfort (1981), as an example, serves as a nod to the western genre. Like The Warriors, the male bonding aspects are dialed up a notch, as a group of National Guardsmen (played by the likes of Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Peter Coyote, T.K. Carter and Fred Ward) on weekend maneuvers make the mistake of shooting in the direction of angry Cajuns. Action, style, startling scenery, and machismo trump characterization and plotting in this intense action yarn that delivers the answer to the question: What would a film look like if The Wild Bunch met Deliverance?
Extreme Prejudice (1987), meanwhile, is an old-fashioned oater in modern sheep’s clothing, with Texas Ranger Nick Nolte facing off against drug kingpin/former friend Powers Boothe near the Tex-Mex border. The high-testosterone cast also boasts Michael Ironside, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown and William Forsythe. Once again, the Peckinpah resemblance remains evident.
While 1992’s Trespass is set in modern-day East St. Louis, it has the feel of a contemporary Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Working with a script penned by Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, this tough, tightly wound thriller follows the attempt of firemen Bill Paxton and William Sadler to retrieve stolen goods from a warehouse, only to find themselves cornered by gangsters Ice T and Ice Cube. The film’s original name, The Looters, was changed shortly before its release because of the 1992 L.A. riots. The timing, of course, didn’t bode well for the film’s box-office returns.
In point of fact, none of Hill’s westerns, or pseudo-western efforts, ever truly lit the box-office on fire. So far, the 1982 action-comedy 48 Hrs. remains the biggest hit of his directing career. Working with a cast that was much-changed during pre-production, and a script that was worked on by several “A”-list screenwriters right up until shooting, the enthusiastic response to the movie was mostly owed to Eddie Murphy, the Saturday Night Live standout who played a convict granted two days’ prison leave at the behest of gruff, unconventional cop Nick Nolte to help track down a murderer in San Francisco. The chemistry between the craggy detective and streetwise hood worked well with Hill’s gift of mixing slam-bang action and off-the-cuff R-rated comedy, turning the movie into a smash hit that eventually spawned a less-than-stellar, Hill-helmed 1990 sequel.
The filmmaker’s way with odd couples led to some forgettable studio assignments, directing Richard Pryor and John Candy in a 1985 remake of the 1940s farce Brewster’s Millions, as well as the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Jim Belushi 1988 Glasnost-era actioner Red Heat.
But Hill was not afraid of taking chances. The filmmaker’s love for music permeates two of his most unusual works. 1984’s Streets of Fire, advertised as a “rock and roll” fable, showcased music written (but not performed by) the likes of Tom Petty, Bob Seger, Stevie Nicks and others. Set in “Another Time, Another Place,” the futuristic/fifties mashup—best described as “Greasepunk”– stars Diane Lane as a rock star kidnapped during performance by shirtless cycle gang leader Willem Dafoe. To the rescue comes Lane’s ex-boyfriend Michael Pare, joined by business manager Rick Moranis and no-nonsense ex-soldier Amy Madigan.
Hill moved from MTV-influenced high energy rock and pop to blues with 1986’s Crossroads, in which classical guitar student Ralph Macchio joins forces with elderly bluesman Joe Seneca to search for a missing blues song—and help Seneca reclaim his soul in the process. The trek leads to the Mississippi Delta where they encounter the legacy of late bluesman Robert Johnson, who also sold his soul to the Devil. While Crossroads received good reviews, it did not click with audiences.
Hill also tried two film noirs with mixed critical and box-office results. Johnny Handsome (1989) features Mickey Rourke in the title role as a deformed criminal determined to even the score with the ex-partners (Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin) who left him to take the fall during a coin store robbery. Once he gets out of prison, Johnny undergoes experimental facial surgery that makes him unrecognizable from his previous disfigured form. But will the change of face also alter his wiring and help him go straight? This is philosophical stuff, served with dollops of jarring violence, that didn’t thrill critics or last long in theaters.
Drawing a similar fate, Last Man Standing (1996) served up a violence-strewn Prohibition Era retake on Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (itself a westernization of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo). As Irish and Italian gangs square off against each other in nasty altercations for control of a Texas town, mysterious loner Bruce Willis shows up and begins playing the sides against each other to his benefit. As expected, Hill’s expertise at shooting action sequences was on display, and he didn’t shy away from extended bursts of gunplay or macho attitude exuded by the sly-as-a-fox character played by Willis. The highly entertaining but totally overlooked genre piece also features another Hill-chosen gallery of alpha males: Bruce Dern, Christopher Walken, David Patrick Kelly and Michael Imperioli, with lovely Karina Lombard thrown in for female window dressing.
Hill has also delved into science fiction and horror during his career. Along with working intermittently with the Alien franchise—he was never interested in directing any installment, because he has no patience with special effects—Hill helmed Supernova, a disastrous 2000 release about a serial killer in outer space. After scenes were reshot by other directors (The Hidden’s Jack Sholder among them) and Francis Coppola reedited the film, Hill had his name taken off the final version, released under the nom de screen of Thomas Lee.
The director, however, fared better on the small screen with such material. A longtime fan of EC Comics, Hill joined forces with Alien co-writer David Giler, Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Richard Donner as executive producers on HBO’s successful Tales from the Crypt series, as well as its theatrical spinoffs and the short-lived EC-inspired series Perversions of Science.
Now in his fifth decade of working in Hollywood, Hill appears to entering into a second act of sorts. Along with the soon-to-be-issued Stallone picture, there’s a hitman saga called St. Vincent slated to shoot in 2013. There are some as-of-yet unrealized projects, such as a remake of Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and a remake of John Woo’s The Killer, whose time have already passed.
It remains to be seen if Hill will ever lens these projects. But if he does, you can bet he’ll shoot first and ask questions later.