Walter Hillis,likeJonathan Demme, one of those unsung American auteurs who has contributed greatly to the popular culture but rarely gets the attention or recognition that he rightfully deserves. Hill has been instrumental in a number of key cultural touchstones in decades past – everything from theAlienfranchise to HBO’sTales from the Cryptseries – and remains active and creative (his last film wasThe Assignment, released theatrically in 2017), even if his output isn’t as regular or mainstream.
What’s remarkable about Hill is that almost from the get-go, he had cultivated what a “Walter Hill film” meant. It was unselfconscious and seemingly effortless process, but his style and his thematic interests are so specific and so deeply saturated into each project that from the beginning of his career, you knew what you’d be in for if you chose to watch one of his movies.
And it’s worth noting that Hill had just as much impact on the small screen. His pilot forDog and Cat, a thriller he had created for ABC that starred a youngKim Basinger, was said to have inspiredShane Blackwhen he wroteLethal Weapon. BesidesTales from the Crypt, Hill tried to jump-start a number of tangentially related shows including the underappreciated sci-fi spin-offPerversions of Science(Hill directed the terrific first episode). He directed the first episode of Deadwood (and won an Emmy for it) but, despite a producer credit, left after the first episode because of disagreements with creatorDavid Milch. And he had some of the best success in the later part of his career with the AMC miniseriesBroken Trail, which won the Emmy for best miniseries and awards for both actors (Thomas Hayden ChurchandRobert Duvall). I also highly recommend his comic bookTriggermanif you need any more Walter Hill-y goodness.
Buckle-up for a list full of tough guys, sassy broads, and a whole lot of punches thrown. Best accompanied by any one ofRy Cooder’s slide-guitar-filled soundtracks.
21. Supernova (2000)
For years Hill had been offered sci-fi projects and for years he had turned those projects down, fearing that they would be too similar to his landmark work onAlien(by all accounts it was Hill’s draft of the script thatRidley Scottultimately shot). After two directors had been attached and then left the project, Hill signed on largely at the urging of starJames Spader. The production ofSupernova, based on an oldWilliam Maloneproject he’d been working on withH.R. Giger, was seemingly doomed at every turn – a production partnership with effects company Digital Domain dissolved, leading the production to incur significant cost overages (if they’d been working together, the effects costs would have lessened), MGM slashed the budget midway through production, and Hill was forced to screen the movie before the effects work had been properly finished. This led to two directors taking over the project once Hill left during post-production, including Francis Ford Coppola, who made a number of flabbergasting, borderline unethical decisions including digitally placing Angela Bassett and Spader’s heads on two other actors and then digitally “darkening” the actress’ skin to match Bassett’s (whew boy). And all of the friction and behind-the-scenes drama wouldn’t matter if the film was any good, which it was not. You can tell what Hill was going for with the little of his footage that remains in the film; it’s meant to be about characters redeeming themselves at the edge of space and some of them literally losing their soul (although elaborate make-up effects were also jettisoned). The cast is great (includingRobert Forster,Lou Diamond Phillipsand an outrageously adorableRobin Tunney) but barely register. Hill adopted a pseudonym (Thomas Lee) for the eventual release and it’s easy to see why he would want to distance himself from this mess.
20. Johnny Handsome (1989)
Closing out his incredibly prolific decade, Hill returned to a more stylized more after the decidedly more commercialRed Heat.Johnny Handsome, based on a novel byThe Taking of Pelham 1-2-3authorJohn Godey, seesMickey Rourkeplaying a disfigured small-time hood who is given a second chance on life (and a plum opportunity for revenge) thanks to a cutting-edge surgical procedure. For the first half hour or so Rourke is encased in unconvincing, Elephant Man-ish make-up that impedes his speech and is just generally distracting and awful. (More than one entertainment writer pointed out that Rourke circaThe Wrestlerlooked like this version of the character.) Once he gets pretty, Rourke maintains the lisp for some reason and sets out on a doomed quest to get back at his former gang members (including a litheLance HenriksenandEllen Barkinas the femme fatale). Everything is heightened and exaggerated but not in the ways that Hill often does best; he was aiming for a tone that was more mournful and melodramatic (he said that if he’d had his druthers he’d have shot the movie in black-and-white) but often comes across as flimsy and artificial. There are still a couple of rousing set pieces (it wouldn’t be a Hill movie without them) andMorgan Freeman, in his lone collaboration, has a lot of fun as an antagonistic detective (there’s also a great performance by a youngForest Whitakeras the doctor that offers to repair Rourke’s face). But this is certainly lower-tier Hill. Maybe he was just too exhausted? Given its New Orleans setting, it’d be easy to pair it withSouthern Comfort,Hard TimesorBullet to the Head, but it’d make for a better double-feature withThe Assignment.
19. Brewster’s Millions (1985)
Brewster’s Millionsis Hill’s only straight-up comedy and as such remains a fascinating outlier. The seventh (!) adaptation of a 1902 novel byGeorge Barr McCutcheon, it starsRichard Pryor(who was originally considered for the Eddie Murphy role in48 Hrs.) as a minor league baseball player whose cruel and vindictive relative gives hm $30 million to spend in 30 days. If he’s able to spend all $30 million, without any assets to his name, he’ll be given $300 million. If he doesn’t spend it all, he’ll get nothing. It’s definitely a fun premise (you’re able to see why it was remade so many times) and the screenplay, by the Trading Spaces team ofTimothy HarrisandHerschel Weingrod, has a few good gags (I love the fact that a commercial train track runs through the outfield of the crummy baseball field in Hackensack, New Jersey, where Pryor plays). Also,John Candy, as Pryor’s fellow ballplayer and best friend, is an absolute riot (his trash talking in the climactic baseball game against the Yankees is so good). But the movie is unremarkable, free of most of Hill’s stylistic flourishes (save for some nifty stuff with graphics and newspaper headlines) and harder-edged approach. It’s easy to consider this soft-boiled Hill. And Pryor, who had already set himself on fire but hadn’t yet been diagnosed with MS, is clearly very high throughout the whole movie, something that Hill himself confirmed many years later. In some sense, it was amazing that Pryor and Hill were able to get any kind of readable performance given the amount of cocaine coursing through the actor’s veins. It’s warm and fun but utterly forgettable, making it rare in Hill’s filmography for those reasons too.
It’s sort of amazing that it took until 2012 for Hill to team-up withSylvester Stallone. But hey –Bullet to the Headhad just lost the original director (Wayne Kramer) and needed a replacement quickly while a movie Hill had been working on had just fallen through, so it wound up being serendipitous for all. Stallone plays a hitman whose partner is murdered after a job and who teams up with a by-the-books detective (played by the charismaticSung Kang), whose ex-partner was also murdered, to find out who did it – and why. The plot isn’t terribly sophisticated (it’s based on a French comic book), but it feels very much like vintage Hill for the most part, who stocks it with colorful character actors in key supporting roles (includingJason Momoa,Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Christian Slaterand, in a brief, hilarious roleHolt McCallany) and some pretty full-throated action sequences. The best of those sequences is an instantly iconic axe fight between Stallone and Momoa, which feels like the next iteration of the hammer fight fromStreets of Fire. Ultimately,Bullet to the Headis more forgettable than the similar movies from Hill’s peak period, with an overall feeling of been-there, done-that. (Hill invented the mismatched buddy cop genre and here he is working on a pale imitation of it.) Stallone too provides a serviceable but not entirely engaged performance and the movie’s constantly shifting release date led to rumors that – surprise surprise! – the movie had been taken away from Hill and was being endlessly tinkered with by producerJoel Silver, who re-teamed with his old confederate Hill.
17. The Assignment (2016)
Proof that Hill was still able to rile people up,The Assignmentprobably wouldn’t be released today – and it only came out four years ago. It’s the story of an evil plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who exacts revenge on a killer by using gender reassignment surgery to turn him into a woman (both incarnations of the character played byMichelle Rodriguez). Once the killer, now known as Tomboy, wakes up after the surgery, he becomes committed to kill everyone associated with the operation. In some ways, it’s like the reverse, grindhouse version ofPedroAlmodovar’sThe Skin I Live In, but instead of thoughtfully examining gender, trauma and the corrosive nature of vengeance,The Assignmentis more interested in bull-soaked action sequences, full-frontal nudity, and a very superficial understanding of what it means to be transgender. That’s not to say that it’s totally unpleasant or distasteful; this is a low budget thriller financed by the same overseas backers that gaveRoman Polanski,Brian De PalmaandPaul Verhoevensimilar late-era project. It’s hard to be upset at something that’s soobvious. And Hill throws all the tropes at this one – a shifting timeline between past and present, a slippery gallery of supporting players includingTony ShalhoubandAnthony LaPaglia, a smoky noir atmosphere and some comic book-y visual flourishes that work much better than when he monkeyed withThe Warriors. This one might be a watch for Hill die-hards only given the iffy subject matter, but those who take the leap will find some surprisingly fun B-movie thrills.
16. Last Man Standing (1996)
When Hill was approached about remakingAkira Kurosawa’sYojimbo, the only condition was that it couldn’t be a western. (At the time there was still litigation ongoing aboutSergio Leone’sA Fistful of Dollars, seen by many as an unlawful remake.) Instead, Hill chose to setLast Man Standingin a dusty prohibition town, as close to being a western as he could get while still setting it in 1932.Bruce Willis, who shockingly had never worked with Hill before, plays a terse drifter who slides into a small town whose bootlegging operation was being fought over by a pair of rival gangs – one Italian, the other Irish. Willis plays one gang against the other, slipping between both sides of an escalating war, and ultimately deciding to do some unselfish things along the way. Sometimes the back-and-forth of it all can get a little exhausting and confusing (listen to their accent to tell which mid-level character actor is playing a goon on what side of the divide), but it’s also really, really great. Bruce Dern plays the sheriff of the small town and Willis’Pulp Fictionco-starChristopher Walkenis wonderfully off-the-wall as a scar-faced psychopath (the amount of people he machineguns to death is really something). Unsparing and bleak, with a killerRy Cooderscore and almost comically exaggerated violence (Hill said the film wasn’t striving for realism but something more mythic). This was another film that seems to have been taken away from Hill at some point right before release; it originally ran for over two hours and now clocks in at 101 minutes, and there are a number of moments in the theatrical trailer that simply don’t appear in the movie. (The third act has some weird editorial flourishes that I had assumed was to get around an NC-17 rating for the violence but nope, it was just shitty studio mandated cuts.) It might be compromised butLast Man Standingis also a mini-triumph and probably the closest we’ll ever get to what Hill’sDick Tracywould have looked like.
15. Undisputed (2002)
Who would have thought that Hill’s relatively under-the-radar prison boxing movie would bomb at the box office but have a second life as a cult classic on home video and spawn a franchise that is now four movies deep?Undisputedis simple but irresistibly enjoyable, that saw Hill re-team with his production partnerDavid Gilerfor a movie that was truly contemporary (it was his first movie sinceTrespassten years earlier to have a modern setting).Wesley Snipesis a reigning prison yard brawler whose supremacy is challenged by the arrival ofVing Rhames, who plays aMike Tyson-type sent to prison for rape (and facing a $75 million settlement). A mobster (Peter Falk) sets up a match for them and then it ison. Hill has fun with the prison setting, overlaying schematics of the prison’s layout and having a on-screen list of the prison’s crimes anytime a new character is introduced (with some pretty good font and layout choices). Plus you can tell that Hill loves the strange milieu of characters who can intermingle in the prison, from inmates likeFisher StevensandWes StuditoMichael Rookeras a prison guard who helps oversee the fights and the hierarchy that it inevitably leads to. (His depiction of homosexuality in the prison system leaves much to be desired, however.) There are also some nice flourishes like recruiting actual professional boxing commentators, lending it even more realism.Undisputedis arguably Hill’s last really good movie (it was co-produced byQuentin Tarantino’s A Band Apart production company).
14. Red Heat (1988)
Hill returned to the buddy comedy formula he had established in48 Hrs., this time withArnold Schwarzeneggeras a Russian operative hunting a dangerous criminal in Chicago who gets paired with a wise-ass detective played byJames Belushi.Red Heatstarts off incredibly strong, with a sequence full of casual full-frontal nudity (ah, the 80s) that culminates with throwing a guy out of a Russian spa and into the snow. A few scenes later Arnold rips off a drug dealer’s wooden leg and shakes loose the cocaine hidden inside. Hill later admitted that the movie loses momentum once Arnold leaves Russia (less than 30 minutes in), which is mostly true – while Schwarzenegger is a skilled physical comedian and plays the heavy really well (also his accent actually helps the character), Belushi’s performance is mostly limp and uninteresting. But there are still some terrific moments in the Chicago including an ideological debate between Arnold and an African American drug kingpin, a bus chase that recallsThe Driverand pre-datesSpeedand stellar supporting performances by a youngLaurence FishburneandGina Gershon. Still, Hill’s considerable style and commitment to its labyrinthine plot, worked on by a succession of Hollywood screenwriters during production, make this a fun (and hugely underrated) 1980s action extravaganza. It’s certainly one of the most violent!
13. Another 48 Hrs. (1990)
Forget about the Snyder Cut. Can we get a petition going for the Hill cut ofAnother 48 Hrs.? Apparently Hill’s original cut of the movie was around 145 minutes; it was trimmed down to 120 minutes shortly before the release and then chopped down to 95 minutes without Hill’s approval weeks before the movie opened in theaters. (Actors, who had shot substantial roles, saw their involvement disappear in a plume of smoke and entire subplots and character arcs were cruelly deleted.) As it stands, the movie is a fair approximation of the first film. You can feel Hill’s pull towards westerns in the audacious opening sequence, when a trio of bikers lay waste to a dusty roadside diner, and his desire to up the intensity and the stylization of the first film (both are felt in the climactic set piece, which takes place in a neon-drenched, pseudo-S&M club). And there are things that don’t make a ton of sense in this truncated version, including why Murphy is still in prison (he was caught stealing checks in the jail but was set up?) and what his relationship with an older Black prisoner is (???) Still, Murphy gets some moments to shine (the scene where he’s calling all of his former accomplices trying to get somebody to help him out is gut-busting) and the conceit that Nolte has 48 hours to clear his name is a nice inversion of the first movie’s dynamic. But the movie also ties its into knots trying to replicate the charm and energy of the first film and sadly comes up short most of the time. It’s still a lot of fun but pretty inessential.
12. Trespass (1992)
You wouldn’t expect it butTrespassbegan life as a script by theBack to the Futureteam ofRobert ZemeckisandBob Gale, who had penned the screenplay back in the late 1970s, long before Marty McFly took that fateful trip to 1955. While Hill had worked with Zemeckis on theTales from the Cryptproperty, it was producerNeil Cantonwho showed the old draft to the director, who sparked to it immediately. Supposedly the script was faithfully adapted, although the ending was changed significantly after test screenings and a decision to delay the release following the L.A. riots. (The name was also changed fromLooterstoTrespass.) In the filmBill PaxtonandWilliam Sadlerpay a pair of firefighters who are handed a treasure map to buried treasure from a dying man. While searching for the treasure in an abandoned factory in East St. Louis, they witness a gangland execution and their day goes from bad to worse. A trigger-happy Sadler kidnaps the lead gangster’s brother and all hell breaks loose as they try to find the treasure and escape the abandoned factory with their lives. Trespass is a typical Gale/Zemeckis screenplay in the way that it is able to ratchet up the tension continually until it literally explodes, and Hill wisely allowed his ensemble (includingIce-TandIce Cube) to improvise and give the gang members more depth and personality. Some of Hill’s other embellishments, like having a large portion of the movie appear as though it was shot from a gang member’s camcorder, feels both ahead of its time and (now) horribly dated. And the ending does feel rushed and unsatisfying (the final button is pretty great though).
