Last Man Standing

Walter Hill – 1996 – USA 

The thing I’ve always loved and responded to in Walter Hill’s films, (as in those of his like-minded colleague John Carpenter), is that they are insistently old-fashioned in their style and treatment of themes, in a way that is perceptible to cineastes but may either be invisible or mistaken for incompetence by casual viewers.  This method is significant because it is not nostalgic or artificial as in the films of certain other directors who long for an earlier era and enjoy boasting of their knowledge of the obscure.  Being older – the same age as the “movie brats” of the 70s – Carpenter and Hill have little to prove and demonstrate repeatedly in their films their foundational tutelage at the feet of American masters like Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock.  Instead of winking to the audience by making obvious references to other films, they let you gradually sense and appreciate the fact that they have absorbed the lessons of the masters and are no longer emulating but building their own styles.  Last Man Standing can be seen as Walter Hill’s testament film, and I think it might be regarded as his magnum opus in the future.  I say this knowing full well that his earlier string of lean genre films are much more beloved; The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979), The Long Riders (1980), Southern Comfort (1981), etc.  I merely suggest that Last Man Standing is the work of a mature and confident artist; quite conscious of making a capstone for his work to date and captioning it with the unwritten legend: ‘If you want to know what Walter Hill’s cinema is, you can begin, and end, here.’  Of all people, Hill would have been mindful that the very premise of the film, originating in the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest (1927) and The Glass Key (1931), was itself an instrument for demonstrating the progression of film styles in world cinema.  The books had provided most of the plot for Akira Kurosawa’s classic Yojimbo (1961), which in turn was unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) that delivered unto us not only Clint Eastwood but the entire ‘spaghetti western’ genre.  The story was again borrowed for Roger Corman’s 1984 sword-and-sorcery cult classic The Warrior and the Sorceress, and had considerable influence on the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990) too.  Hill’s version takes place in the dust-ridden American south of the 1930s, in a desolate Texas town bled dry by warring mob clans.  Save for a saloon owner and a haggard sheriff, the gangsters are the only real residents left; everyone else has either died in the crossfire or fled.  One day a man (Bruce Willis) sardonically identifying himself as ‘John Smith’ drives into town and is immediately drawn into the gangs’ violent squabbles.  The casting of Willis is a small liability, (though I don’t really have a problem with him), because his face plastered on ads behind a pointed gun implies that this film is all about Bruce Willis shooting stuff.  But his character is really a cypher about whom we learn almost nothing; he is a tourist whose taciturn nature allows us to focus on everything else in the film; especially a remarkable cross-section of crazed and colorful characters played by veteran weirdos like William Sanderson, Bruce Dern, Christopher Walken and special favorite of Hill fans, David Patrick Kelly.  The dreamy transitions between scenes and the film’s aggressive photographic stylization, utilizing a sepia-toned filter that comes dangerously close to being sickening, serve the purpose of critiquing, not mimicking, efforts at nostalgia in movies.  Hill depicts a bleak moral landscape where only one in a thousand opportunities to do good may be taken.  As evocations of the western genre, long out of fashion, all of Hill’s best films deal with this basic issue of how beaten men in a violent world are driven to a point where they have to decide whether to become a monster or to make some small contribution to the ideas of community and civility.  America in 1996 was no place for a film like this; it was the year of Jerry Maguire, Independence Day, Evita and Shine; big blockbusters and feel-good award-winners.  Like John Carpenter’s near-simultaneous 1996 offering, Escape from L.A., Hill’s Last Man Standing was almost universally loathed by critics and ignored by movie-goers; a commercial failure with very few champions.  Its reputation has risen drastically in the past 18 years, and I have little doubt that time will vindicate Hill as new generations of film-lovers discover his amazing track-record of solid, unpretentious action dramas and elevate them above the bland Oscar-bait and popcorn films that so easily impress middlebrow film critics.