Will the real Walter Hill please stand up?
The screenwriter and director is hard to label. Should Hill, now in his 80s, be considered the screenwriter of classic crime films like “The Getaway” and “The Drowning Pool?” The director of uncharacteristic, offbeat films like “Streets of Fire,” “Brewster’s Millions” and “Crossroads?” Or the auteur of great action movies like “The Warriors,” “The Long Riders” and the “48 HRS” films?
All of the above, of course.
Hill is regarded as a “tough guy” filmmaker who sharpens the edge of already edgy genres like noir, crime and western films who also shaped the stories for “Alien” and two of its sequels, including one of the greatest action films of all time, “Aliens,” from 1986.
Hill is an artist but also a pragmatist. In a 2022 interview with Forbes to mark the release of his most recent film, the Western “Dead for a Dollar,” Hill talks about having to shoot the finale of the film only part-way through production because of scheduling availability for stars Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz.
Hill said he regretted having to shoot the film’s ending early. But, he noted, “It’s a much greater test of your technical skills and your filmmaking craft to do it that way, as you should really shoot the end of movies at the end. It also helps if the financiers threaten to pull the plug on you. They are less likely to do that if you don’t have an ending.”
Grit but outdated attitudes
Hill worked in small roles in film production, on “Bullitt” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” before his first produced screenplays, including “Hickey & Boggs,” “The Getaway” and “The MacIntosh Man.” He wrote “The Drowning Pool,” the really smart and moody 1973 Paul Newman thriller, and by the mid-1970s was turning out gritty thrillers like “Hard Times” and “The Driver.”
It’s “Hickey & Boggs,” his first produced screenplay, from 1972, that’s maybe the most germane to the type of films Hill was beginning to make.
A recent rewatch of the movie shows that its attitudes are way, way out of date. Most of the dialogue is tough and that’s good, but its verbal treatment of the women in the story is awful.
But if you can get past that AND the repugnant history of its co-lead, Bill Cosby, “Hickey & Boggs” is a good story of two small-time private investigators who find themselves in the middle of a criminal case gone very wrong.
Cosby plays Al Hickey and Robert Culp, Cosby’s “I Spy” co-star and director here, plays Frank Boggs. The two spend a lot of time in their rundown office and in dive bars. When they’re not in those places, they’re making their way through trash-strewn streets and dealing with an incredible cast that includes Rosalind Cash, Robert Mandan, Michael Moriarty, Ed Lauter and the great Vincent Gardenia.
Hickey and Boggs clash with cops and hoods, led by Mandan, and have your higher-than-usual number of stadium shootouts. Culp does a good job interpreting Hill’s street-level intrigue. If you can stand seeing Cosby – who isn’t jokey, at least, other than being unable to get doors open – it’s a good crime movie period piece.
It’s the coming middle period of Hill’s career, however, that is probably his most impactful.
Moving through hostile territory
It might be hard to remember now, but few films of the 1980s landed with the impact of “48 HRS” in 1982. Written and directed by Hill, the bloody and violent action film starred not only Nick Nolte but made a huge star of Eddie Murphy, who wouldn’t headline “Beverly Hills Cop” until 1984.
Hill’s film manages to be both raw and slick, with the profane leads battling each other and a host of bad guys, led by murderous livewire James Remar. If you’ve forgotten, Nolte is a cop – he’s a loose cannon but he gets results, I tell you! – and Murphy is a con who team up to find Remar and his host of bloodthirsty cohorts. They navigate through San Francisco’s foggy back alleys and a country bar in a scene that was revolutionary in its mix of incendiary action and humor.
If you had to point to one film and say, “That’s a Walter Hill film,” it very well might be “48 HRS,”
“The Warriors” is also an acceptable answer.
Released in 1979, the same year as “Alien” and a year before “The Long Riders,” Hill’s third film as a director showed his absolute self-assurance behind the camera.
Even though I was reviewing movies at the time, I somehow didn’t see “The Warriors” – other than bits and pieces on home video back in the day – until the year of our lord 2023. Yes, I’m more shocked than anyone.
If you care enough to have heard of the movie, you already know this, but I’ll be brief: “The Warriors” starts out at a summit of New York City neighborhood gangs but quickly turns into a film about being hunted as the title gang, led by Michael Beck, James Remar (from “48 HRS”) and Deborah Van Valkenburgh (from “Streets of Fire”) must make it back to their home territory. They’ve been framed for a murder that prompted a police crackdown and every gang is either chasing or lying in wait for them.
Hill’s “Southern Comfort” and “The Warriors” are two films of a kind and feature a small band trying to move through hostile territory. It’s a Western trope like those Hill loves and at which he excels.
“The Warriors” is unlike most Westerns, though, because of its best visual conceit: the warring gangs are immediately recognizable by their uniforms. Perhaps the most strikingly visual is the uniform of the Baseball Furies. It’s an image used to promote the film and Hill’s style and way with gritty action makes the film memorable and more highly regarded than at the time of its release.
In retrospect, “The Warriors” seems like a proof of concept for what I consider Hill’s best and most offbeat but ultimately in-character film.
Hill’s ‘Rock and Roll Fable’
Considering the sheer weight of Walter Hill’s output as a screenwriter and director, it might seem unlikely that anyone would consider his 1984 film “Streets of Fire” as his best work.
I know, I know. But I do.
I think my high regard for “Streets of Fire” is partly because it was the right movie at the right time. I was reviewing movies for my hometown newspaper at the time – actually, from the late 1970s to 1990 – and I loved both deep, impactful spectacles like “Ran” and gritty, clever films like “Body Heat” and “Blood Simple.”
But “Streets of Fire” managed to combine elements of many film genres – western, crime and noir, action, science fiction and fantasy and musicals – in a stylized, fantastical manner like few films I’d seen at the time.
MTV had been around for three years by the time of Hill’s film and the groundbreaking TV series “Miami Vice” wouldn’t debut until September 1984, three months after “Streets of Fire.” Both “Miami Vice” – apocryphally ordered up by NBC entertainment division boss Brandon Tartikoff as “MTV cops” – and “Streets of Fire” owed a debt to the music television channel.
It isn’t just the musical elements – the driving score by Ry Cooder and music video-style sequences – that make “Streets of Fire” live large in my memory of that time, but they make an indelible impression. Not surprisingly, the best songs were the work of composer Jim Steinman, who brought the same operatic style to Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” album. But the music is as integral to the film as any movie that isn’t a musical.
The movie, if you’re not familiar with it, takes place in a postwar time and city filled with beautiful 1950s-style cars, motorcycles and trains. Two soldiers, Cody and McCoy, played by Michael Pare and Amy Madigan, venture into a part of the city dominated by the Bombers, a biker gang. The gang, led by Willem Dafoe as an ice-faced maniac named Raven, has kidnapped Ellen Aim, a singer and Cody’s former flame, played by Diane Lane. The heroes must rescue Ellen and return her to the stage. They must run a battery of antagonists, including rocker Lee Ving as one of Raven’s vicious bikers and Richard Lawson as a sympathetic but overmatched cop who tries to talk them out of their quest.
The cast is quite good and one gets the feeling that Hill directed Pare, Madigan and Ellen’s manager, played by Rick Moranis, to let their performances loom large. Pare does seem the least convincing of the cast, which is unfortunate. And no one plays their role as big as Dafoe, whose look – stark white skin and black leather and the scariest of expressions – is indelible.
Hill stages it all, especially a sledgehammer fight between the antagonists, in a manner both harrowing and operatic.
“Streets of Fire” was meant to kick off a series of adventures for Cody but was offbeat and off-putting enough to turn audiences away. The movie opened the same day as “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” and moviegoers knew who they wanted to see on the big screen. Kirk, Spock and company returned to the big screen again and again. Cody and McCoy did not, although in 2008, Pare headlined a low-budget home video sequel, “Road to Hell.” (It was not directed by Hill and it does not look great.)
Hill would go on to write, direct or produce a number of films through and including “Dead for a Dollar.” He still might have another “48 HRS” or “Southern Comfort” or “Streets of Fire” in him. At least we can wish that might be the case. He does not seem inclined to revisit old territory.
In the Forbes interview, Hill recounted seeing “The Warriors” at a contemporary outdoor screening in Italy and being surprised at the interest in the film and at how well it had held up. He said he hadn’t seen it in 40 years.
“I tend not to watch my things after I finish them. I can’t change anything and always see something I’d like to improve. When you do these things, they all, to one degree or another, fall short of the dream. You have to really be an obsessive perfectionist to be a film director or at least one that hangs around for a while, so you’re never totally happy with what you’ve done. Also, I think (it’s) probably not a good thing to dwell on the past and feel triumphant about something. It’s much better to look to the future and stay productive.”
