It stars Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward, T. K. Carter, Franklyn Seales and Peter Coyote.
The film, set in 1973, features a Louisiana Army National Guard squad of nine from an infantry unit on weekend maneuvers in rural bayou country as they antagonize some local Cajun people and become hunted.
In 1973 a squad of nine Louisiana Army National Guard soldiers convene in a local bayou for weekend maneuvers.
A happily-married chemical engineer in his civilian life, Hardin wants no part of a date with prostitutes which PFC Spencer has arranged for himself and their squad-mates.
The squad's leader, Staff Sergeant Poole, a Vietnam War veteran, tells one of his men to leave a note explaining the situation, and orders the soldiers into three of the four pirogues.
The Cajuns return fire with live ammunition, killing Poole and sending the squad into a panic as they make their way toward cover.
Reece refuses to give up the live ammo until he is forced at knife-point by Hardin and Casper divides it evenly among the soldiers, to bolster their chances of defense.
Bowden uses gasoline to make a Molotov cocktail, but upon throwing it into the cabin to burn the place down, it ignites some TNT inside the shack, blowing it up, along with numerous provisions of food, fresh water, guns, and ammunition.
The following morning, Reece tortures the one-armed Cajun by dunking his head in a fetid pond.
Rushing headlong into the swamp after the chopper as it moves onward, Stuckey sinks to his death in quicksand.
Casper throws a homemade grenade at the Cajuns to no avail, then fixes his bayonet to his rifle and charges at them.
Spencer, Hardin, and the now-catatonic Bowden camp for the night and discuss their lives, agreeing they will fight for their own survival and each others.
The following morning Hardin and Spencer are jolted awake by a freight train, and then realize that Bowden is missing.
He gives them directions on how to escape the bayou, apparently in recognition of Spencer treating him humanely and Hardin outright saving him from being murdered by Reece.
As Spencer happily mixes with the villagers, a wary Hardin sees the arrival of the three remaining hunter-trappers who massacred their squad.
Spencer suddenly shows up, firing blanks at the Cajun as a distraction, giving Hardin the chance to stab him in the groin.
[6] According to Walter Hill, he and David Giler had a deal with 20th Century Fox to "acquire and develop interesting, commercial scripts that could be produced cheaply.
According to Hill, "No studio wanted to make it, but an independent production shop showed up who had a relationship with Fox.
)[1] Powers Boothe was cast after Hill and Giler saw him play Jim Jones in the mini series Guyana Tragedy.
[9] Hill said the concept of Keith Carradine's character "was that he was one of nature's aristocrats – graceful, confident of his own ability and able to separate himself from other people with an amusing remark", whereas the character played by Boothe "is much more the rational, hardworking, self made individual" and as a result "just cannot believe the nature of the situation at first" whereas Carradine's can.
"[12] Walter Hill said the film was "not a simple action movie where the people chasing the other out there is bad": It is clearly in a sense the kind of fault of our guys for getting into this situation.
With mixed results and accompanying paranoia even by those who are the best and the brightest of the bunch... None of us are quite as good or bad as we construct them.
"[8] On the Rotten Tomatoes website the film has received a positive reception from critics with an overall rating of 77% from 22 reviews.
[14] Roger Ebert rated it 3 stars, stating that it is "a film of drum-tight professionalism" but criticizing it for making its characters "into larger-than-life stick figures, into symbolic units who stand for everything except themselves.
"[15] While he said that the stock nature of the characters reminded him greatly of the way Hill approached the gang members in The Warriors (to which he gave a 2 stars, thumbs down review) he also said that he would recommend Southern Comfort partly because he had overlooked good qualities of Hill's previous film over that issue, and that the atmosphere and pacing of Southern Comfort were so strong that he gave it a thumbs up.
At the time critics regularly made reference to the film's plot similarities to John Boorman's 1972 thriller Deliverance.
In the late 1980s Iranian state TV IRIB broadcast the film, under the name "Operation Lagoon" (Amaliyate Mordab).
In the Iranian version, a group of US Army soldiers who opposed the Vietnam War are sent on a mission among man-hunters, equipped only with blanks.
Iranian film critics believed that the IRIB censored version made more sense considering the American government's atrocities overseas.