![]() ![]() I can, in other words, write about myself. What I can do, though, is watch a body of work and identify throughlines in it that speak to me. I’m not an archivist, not a historian, really, and though I enjoy interviewing my heroes, I wouldn’t say I have a particular gift nor interest in it. Aldrich who, born to wealth and privilege, gave it all up to make ‘guy flicks’ that were nonetheless rooted in social awareness and protest. The more I watched his movies, though, the more I saw Hill as continuing in the tradition of filmmakers like Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, Howard Hawks and, especially, Robert Aldrich. Part of that has to do I think with Hill’s own aversion to dwelling too much on his own work but mostly, I think Hill’s films are seen as merely action movies, ‘guy flicks’ easily digestible and just as easily disposable. Charles Taylor wrote an incredible essay about Robert Culp’s Hickey & Boggs, Hill’s first produced screenplay, but aside from a few rich interviews and archival videos, there wasn’t much scholarship. But there had been no serious critical studies of him in English. There might be another in German, I’m not sure. So I looked for books about Hill and discovered that there was one - but it was in Italian. Along with a couple hundred devotees, I floated out of the auditorium. All of those things in a way almost physical, and I wanted to know what it was about these pictures - and their director, Walter Hill, that could inspire so specific a response. I had recently gotten the opportunity to watch The Warriors and Streets of Fire on 35mm archival prints and even though I had seen them before, revisiting them at this time, in that format, was… visceral? Kinetic? Exhilarating. The book also includes a note from Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Last Night in Soho.įrom the author: "A Walter Hill Film is a 400-page critical study of Walter Hill’s films and early screenplays that began, as a lot of these projects do, with a question. ![]() ![]() The foreword is by Larry Gross, Hill's writing partner on 48 HRS. The James Joyce of crime fiction James Ellroy wrote the introduction. The author is Walter Chaw, film critic for Film Freak Central and a contributor to The New York Times, Vulture, NPR and many other publications. films, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Geronimo, Streets of Fire, Wild Bill, Broken Trail, the Alien films, and the pilot for Deadwood. A Walter Hill Film is the first critical biography of Walter Hill, the legendary writer-director producer whose filmography includes 48 HRS. ![]()
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