The future director Alex Cox left his native England in Los Angeles in 1977 because he found that the British film scene was missing. While attending the UCLA, he directed his first short film, “Edge City”, a bitter film, Talky and semi-priority on artists in difficulty wandering in the ugliest parts of the city, having conversations on the nature of artistic success. (“Edge City” is on YouTube.) This short film led to a plum agreement with Mike Nesmith (from The Monkees group), which obtained more than a million dollars for the first functionality of Cox, “Repo Man” of 1984, a seminal film of the Punk Rock scene and a legitimate cult phenomenon. “Repo Man” was not a success at the start, but his soundtrack (full of hardcore) sold so well that she was reissued, becoming a financial success.

Advertisement

Cox came to love punk rock, already embodying his mind somewhat in his vision of the creation of cinema. In 1986, the filmmaker made “Sid and Nancy”, a noisy biopic on Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) of the Sex Pistols (Gary Oldman) and his violent relationship with Nancy SPUNGEN (Chloe Webb). This film was critical of a critical way at the time and is still loved to date. “Repo” and “Nancy” are considered vital works in the canon of punk cinema.

In 1987, however, Cox’s growing relationship with Hollywood stopped. He made the critical and unsuccessful turn “Straight to Hell”, a modern remake of the Spaghetti Western “Django Kill … If you live, shoot!” The film has a cult that follows today, largely because the cast included musicians like Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and Grace Jones. (Director Jim Jarmusch also appears.) But at the time, nobody loved him. The same year, Cox produced “Walker”, a biographical western on William Walker (Ed Harris), a crazy revolutionary who once inserted himself in the presidency of Nicaragua. He had a budget of $ 6 million, the largest of Cox to date.

Advertisement

But it was tried too political and too violent for universal, and the studio decided not to promote the film. When he only won $ 300,000 at the box office, Cox was officially disappointed.

To offer a historical perspective, “Walker” was released in the middle of one of the many scandals of Ronald Reagan. Reagan secretly and illegally funded the contras, a Nicaraguan right-wing militia group who waged war in the country’s communist government, which had come to power in 1979. The contras were broken down to have regularly raped the rights of Nicaragian citizens, and a legislative amendment made the illegal for the United States. Reagan continued to give them money anyway, and violence continued. It was an excellent example of modern colonialism, the CIA and the US government manipulating world governments for their own twisted purposes.

Advertisement

Ask your parents the Iran-Contra affair sometimes, because there were a lot of embezzlement beyond the above description. Or at least look at “the last thing he wanted”.

“Walker” was done in response to the scandal, and Cox found another historical example of an American obsessed with violence that infiltrated Nicaragua. In the 1850s, William Walker was hired by billionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle) to go to Nicaragua and help the local Democratic Party to overthrow the seated legitimist government. Vanderbilt only wants access to an expedition route by land, but Walker believes in manifest destiny, thinking that he accomplishes a greater task. Walker wins several bloody battle victories and effectively fulfills her mission, although she leads to dagger and fake elections and total chaos in the region. Walker no longer appoints the president of Nicaragua, a position he held for two years. He tries to present slavery and kills people who oppose him. There is no way that it ends well.

Advertisement

And indeed, the end of “Walker” is a surreal anachronistic fulfillment which links the events of the film to the current, rather explicit.

“Walker” ends with the main character to go so crazy that he orders the city to be burned on the ground. He also begins to shout that America will never leave Nicaragua. They are intended to be there. Then, in a surprising touch, Walker is assailed by modern American helicopters (!) Which land to evacuate the Americans at the expense of Walker. Walker declares himself arrogantly the president of Nicaragua, so he is left behind. During the credits, Cox reduced Reagan’s images that lie on the American presence in Nicaragua.

Advertisement

We can see why Universal found that “Walker” was “too political”. Cox did not observe a sweet parallel between Walker and Reagan, but explicitly saying that they were motivated by the same dark and violent impulses and obsessions, tinkering in the affairs of another country through a certain twisted colonialist justice.

The film attracted some notorious pots. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two inch downwards, both with zero-star criticisms. Ebert’s criticism Declared that it is a useless meli-meli, writing “this film is apparently intended for a comedy or a satire. I write” apparently “because, if it is a comedy, it has not laughed, and if a satire, no target.” Many criticisms have found that Cox’s political posture was too obvious and too chaotic to land effectively. When writing these lines, the film has only 47% approval on Rotten Tomatoes (on the basis of 15 critics). He was not recovered until years later, finally obtaining a sufficient reputation to be released on the collection of criteria.

Advertisement

Indeed, on the Blu-ray criterion, there is a special characteristic in which Cox reads aloud some of the negative “walker” critics received. He hated the treatment of the studioand refused to work again in the studio system, even saying Club that it was put on a “blacklist”. Cox did nine additional features because, all without major distribution agreements in the United States, the manufacturer of “Repo Man”, understandable, took his ball and returned home.