You Ain't Seen Me, Right? - Walker (1987)

We've all cheered at Die Hard, laughed at Babe and cried at Terminator 2, but You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is the weekly feature that attempts to introduce lesser-known films into our collective viewing experience.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. He puts the hard work in, while we reap the benefits.

Walker (1987)

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The term 'Maverick' is one that has been used so frequently and erroneously that it is has become as redundant as referring to something as 'genius' - which is a pity, as there are those to whom the epithet genuinely applies. Alex Cox is one such example. A devoted cinephile - he provided insightful introductions to cult films for the BBC's much-missed Moviedrome series - Cox's body of work as a director is as radical as his offbeat tastes would suggest. Cox's first three features - Repo Man (1984), Sid and Nancy (1986) and Straight to Hell (1987) - were amongst the most vibrant and unique of the decade, laying the groundwork for a career that has trod the line between the playful and the profane. Cox's involvement with the Hollywood machine would come to an abrupt end with Walker. Its failure to perform at the box office would leave him unable to secure financing for his projects and exasperated with the difficulties of working within the system.

Walker tells the story of the famed mercenary William Walker (Ed Harris) and the coup d'état he staged in Nicaragua in 1856 at the behest of the wealthy industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), who needed the crucial trade route 'liberated' in order to build a dam there. In the face of great indigenous resistance, Walker and his American Falange assumed power, whereupon Walker's pronounced piety gave way to megalomania. As a sop to Southern sentiment, Walker reinstituted slavery in the country, incurring the wrath of the landowning class that had propped him up, their neighbouring nations and his paymaster Vanderbilt.

A paean to Nicaragua's Sandinista movement, Walker features all the genre deconstruction and sly subversion one has come to expect from Cox's work - it can best be described as a geo-political western, skewing the frontier tropes of Howard Hawks and John Ford to present an alternative history. Joe Strummer's score is an intoxicating blend of Latin rhythms, tribal beats and Morricone-esque atmospherics that splendidly capture the film's wildly individual spirit. Boyle was a perfect piece of casting as Vanderbilt, bringing his customary uncouthness to the role of the foul-mouthed tycoon. Harris's Walker is a startling departure from the alpha males and tough guys he has carved out a niche playing. With his steely-eyed gaze and eerie stillness, Harris eschews his usual barbed delivery and menacing air to capture the growing hubris of a man whose democratic convictions are corrupted by his lust for power.

Rudy Wurlitzer's screenplay draws parallels between Walker's acts of unbridled plunder and Ronald Reagan's incursions into Central America, dissecting America's belief in its 'manifest destiny' to establish hegemony in the region. Vanderbilt embodies this expansionist mindset, swathing his imperialist designs in high-minded rhetoric to salve the credulous Walker's conscience. Walker exposes the motives at the heart of our noblest 'humanitarian interventions', providing an historical context for its attack on the 1980s school of rapacious demagogues who peddle easy answers, deal in simplistic absolutes and claim divine mandate.
And so another film enters the You Ain't Seen Me, Right? vault, forever memorialised on the pages of this site. More next week.