Southern Comfort is, of course, the name of a whiskey-based liqueur, but its use as the title of this film is deeply ironic. "Southern Comfort" may be set in the South, but there is little about it that is comforting. The plot is a common one in war films, that of a group of soldiers stranded in hostile territory. ("Centurion", set in Roman Britain, is a recent example). Director Walter Hill once said "Every film I've done has been a Western," even though only a minority of his films are Westerns in the literal sense. Many of them, however, are male-dominated action films which transfer typical Western plots to some other setting, and it would be easy to re-imagine "Southern Comfort" as a traditional Western about a cavalry patrol cut off in Indian country.
A group of National Guardsmen are on weekend manoeuvres in the bayou country of Louisiana. (Much of the distinctive look of the film derives from the eerie atmosphere of the Bayou's swamps and forests). They get lost, and in order to avoid a long march back to where they should be steal several canoes belonging to local Cajun hunters. When the Cajuns turn up, one of the patrol opens fire on them with a machine gun. This is a stupid prank- the gun is only loaded with blanks- but the Cajuns are not to know this and they return fire with their hunting rifles, killing the sergeant in command of the patrol.
Now at this point the remaining guardsmen should have called off their manoeuvre, made their way back to base and reported the matter to the police. Of course, they do no such thing; the patrol's second-in-command, seemingly believing himself to be in a real war situation, orders his men to continue with their "mission". Not that they need any such orders; most of them are angered by the death of their comrade and determined to wreak revenge on the Cajun community. They arrest a Cajun hunter, regarding him as an "enemy prisoner" to be "interrogated". The Cajuns, however, use their intimate knowledge of the swamps to fight back, stalking the guardsmen and leaving lethal traps for them.
The film came out in 1981, not long after the Vietnam War had ended, and is set in 1973, while that war was still continuing, so it is not surprising that it was widely seen as a Vietnam allegory. The Cajun hunters can be seen as the metaphorical equivalents of the Viet Cong and the National Guardsmen as symbolic of the American troops in Vietnam, fighting in unfamiliar, densely wooded terrain and frustrated by their inability to get to grips with shadowy adversaries who were able to use their superior local knowledge against them. By setting the film in Louisiana, however, the film-makers were able to avoid the political controversy which normally surrounded films ("The Green Berets", "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now") set during the Vietnam War itself.
Another comparison with Vietnam can be seen in the behaviour of several of the squad, undisciplined and capable of brutality not only towards the Cajun "enemy" but also towards one another. One of the patrol, for example, destroys the captured Cajun's house with explosives, without provocation and without orders from a superior, and another is killed by a colleague in a brawl arising out of the interrogation of the "prisoner". No doubt the great majority of those who fought in Vietnam were honourable men who abided by the laws of war, but there were a number of well-publicised incidents (notably the My Lai massacre) which were seized upon by the anti-war movement and North Vietnamese propagandists to paint American soldiers as violent criminals, and these incidents served to undermine the military's "hearts and minds" strategy to win Vietnamese opinion over to their side.
One of the problems faced by the film-makers was that if they made all the guardsmen too unsympathetic the film would not work as a thriller as there would be nobody with whom the audience could identify. The basic plot has some similarities with John Boorman's "Deliverance" from a few years earlier, but in "Deliverance" the group lost in the wilderness were the victims of unprovoked aggression from local people. Nobody could say that the aggression faced by the guardsmen in "Southern Comfort" was unprovoked.
Hill and his collaborators solved this problem by making all the nine members of the group individuals with sharply differing characters. Two in particular stand out from the others, Corporal Hardin and PFC Spencer. Although these two are in many ways different characters, and often disagree with one another, what they have in common is that both are disgusted with the behaviour and attitudes of the others and both retain a decency and humanity which the others have lost. It is these two who are the last survivors of the patrol, and the tension arises from their efforts to make it back to safety. Even the villainous soldiers, however, are differentiated. For example, Corporal Bowden (the one who blows up the house) is a mentally unstable psychopath, and second-in-command Sergeant Casper is an officious but ineffective stickler for military regulations.
As this was very much an "ensemble" film, I won't single any of the actors out for praise, but I will say that they all combine very effectively. Hill is equally effective in his direction, making this a taut, well-paced thriller. The film, however, is more than just an action thriller- more, indeed, than just a Vietnam allegory. It also serves as an allegory for war in general, as conflict erupts out of a seemingly routine situation and that conflict in turn leads to the darker side of human nature taking over. 7/10