The thing I lived for every day was to get home from school and turn the radio on, and then I'd sit there and wait for something to happen." So at that time, you had Ray Price leading the pack with his honky-tonk band, which I was absolutely nuts about. was sort of aimed at the defense plant workers that had come out to work in the aircraft factories. “When I was in high school," Cooder reminisces, “this country music radio station here in L.A. That said, The Prodigal Son, Cooder's first solo outing since 2012's outspoken and agitated Election Special, is the work of an artist who's taking a hard look at the world around him, as well as a look back to the music of his eclectic Southern California upbringing. Lucky, has positioned Cooder as a producer with a remarkably sharp ear for what works in service to a song. Deeper still, his ability to capture and commit to a sound, especially in the bygone Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies of Buena Vista Social Club, or in the modernized blues of John Lee Hooker's late-career resurgence-spurring Mr. His technical prowess and expressiveness with the instrument is legendary, whether he's channeling the solitude and vast open spaces of Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas or conversing with Malian guitar hero Ali Farka Toure on the 1994 classic Talking Timbuktu. Of course, his approach to the guitar meshes with his personality: unhurried, unadorned, and unusually reverent of tradition, without being tethered to it. Not that Cooder is a political firebrand-far from it, in fact-but in the vein of one of his heroes, Woody Guthrie, he feels compelled to call out injustice when he sees it. It comes through in his earliest solo work, from his 1970 rendition of Blind Alfred Reed's “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" to his own three-album “California trilogy" of Chávez Ravine (2005), My Name Is Buddy (2007) and I, Flathead (2008): a restless and relentlessly incisive voice, always speaking truth to power, always aligned with the underdog. It’s also a fascinating watch these days considering the state of the US – the film’s message seems to be that peace is impossible while there remain so many internal divisions and prejudices.Įnter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.Ry Cooder has never been the type to just sit on his hands and shut up.
Ry cooder quicksand youtube movie#
But it certainly it spawned some new movie clichés and looks like an influence on many ’80s movies from ‘Aliens’ to ‘Predator’. Maybe, like ‘The Thing’, it’s far too stark a vision.
The secondary cast of mainly unknowns (the ever-excellent Peter Coyote aside) is also superb.īut ‘Southern Comfort’ was a commercial dud on its 1981 release. Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe are superb as the reluctant heroes who must overcome their basically apolitical stances to become men of action and moral choice.Ĭarradine in particular makes for a fascinating action-man (according to Hill, his character is a ‘Southern aristocrat’). The dialogue is fast and loose – the brain has to be in gear to pick up all the political/ethical nuances that fly by – and the acting styles deceptively ‘naturalistic’. Apparently the shoot was long, cold and difficult, with camera tripods frequently sinking into the bayou. The action sequences are gripping, though never tawdry, and look extremely punishing for the cast – there’s a particularly realistic dog attack and a memorable quicksand incident.
This is a pre-irony, pre-CGI action movie, where men are men (the sort of men who might get a ‘phone call in a pub….on a landline’), decisions have consequences and vengeance is swift and fairly brutal. ‘Southern Comfort’ might also be described as ‘The Warriors’ meets ‘Deliverance’. That rings true too, but watching it again after ten years or so, I couldn’t help comparing it to John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, another all-male classic about creeping, self-defeating paranoia, fudged leadership and dodgy group-think. Hill prefers to call it a ‘displaced Western’, a film about escalating moral dilemmas in unfamiliar surroundings. Set in 1973, his film concerns a motley group of weekend National Guardsmen whose sojourn into Cajun country (with the promise of prostitutes at the end of the road) turns into a desperate fight for survival when a foolish prank leaves them at the mercy of some particularly vengeful locals. To this day, co-writer/director Walter Hill claims that the superb ‘Southern Comfort’ doesn’t directly allude to the Vietnam War, but it’s hard to conclude otherwise.
After the extended prologue, when Ry Cooder’s swampy blues riff slides in over a glorious widescreen shot of the Louisiana bayou, you know you’re watching a classic of its kind.
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