by Stephen Vagg
The debutant effort from Walter Hill.
Walter Hill is best known for his directing, but he was one of the dominant screenwriting voices of Hollywood in the 1970s, his work ranging from the PI toughness of Hickey and Boggs and the epic heist dramas of The Getaway and The Driver, to his fabled Alien rewrite, the Westerns The Long Riders and the unfilmed The Last Gun, gang comic book epic The Warriors and the Depression era fight drama Hard Times.
Lloyd Williams His Brother is the first script Hill wrote and sold. It was never made, but remains a key work in Hill’s development as a filmmaker.
In the 1960s, Hill was working as an assistant director on various films such as Bullitt and Take the Money and Run as well as writing scripts in the evening. In an extensive interview with the Directors’ Guild of America [DGA], Hill says he had a “hard time finishing scripts. My problem was finding certain character narrative concerns.” Indeed, it took him several years of trying until he cracked the code with Lloyd Williams and His Brother.
Lloyd Williams is set in 1887 and is technically a Western, although it’s more of a “boxing Western”, in that the hero spends most of his time punching people in prize fights as opposed to shooting them, although there is still some gun play. (NB. We’re going to get into spoilers for the script here, but since the film was never made, and is unlikely to ever be made, we think it’s okay.)
The story focuses on the two Williams brothers, the chatty Harold, 30, and the more sullen Lloyd, 26. At the beginning of the film, the duo are serving in the US Army at Fort Mason, Texas where Lloyd punches out a bullying sergeant, causing the brothers to desert. They hotfoot it to Julesburg, Colorado, meeting a tough woman along the way: Maggie, who is the female lead. Loyd starts prize fighting for money at the behest of the dodgy Mayor Tubbs, and begins a romance with Maggie. Harold pursues Sarah, wife of the local sheriff, Galt.
Lloyd mauls one of his opponents, Reece, who is an old lover of Maggie, making things tense for the brothers in town. A rich man, Logan, hires a top fighter, Jack Scully, to take on Lloyd and the brothers plan to move to Canada with their women. Lloyd beats Scully in a brutal fight, but Tubbs refuses to pay them, having discovered about the desertion. Harold robs Tubbs and the brothers go to the train station when Sheriff Galt arrives with his men. Guns blaze away: Harold kills Tubbs, Galt kills Harold, Lloyd kills Galt and months later Maggie visits Lloyd in prison. The end. No happy finish here.
Hill managed to sell the script to producer Joe Wizan. This led to a meeting at Warner Bros., which led to Hill selling Hickey and Boggs, which resulted in him getting the job of adapting The Getaway, which became a huge hit and enabled Hill to move into directing with Hard Times. Wizan could never get Lloyd Williams produced, although the film was briefly set up at Warner Bros. in 1971, with Ryan O’Neal at once stage announced to star; Sam Peckinpah was interested in making it after The Getaway but moved on to other projects. Hill repurposed some of the material for Hard Times, which had a similar prize fighting plot.
For a first script, Lloyd Williams and His Brother is a very accomplished piece of work. The characters are well delineated, the story moves fast and logically, there is plenty of action and some sex/romance, plus a finale that feels satisfactory, even if it is downbeat. It is written in conventional style – Hill became famous for scripts with haiku-ish short sentences but he didn’t embrace that form until Hard Times.
As mentioned, it’s not a traditional Western with its emphasis on prize fighting – that unusual combination presumably both helped the script attract a lot of attention and prevented it from being filmed (mind you, there’s always a good reason not to make a movie). Hill appears to have also been influenced by French crime movies and Japanese samurai pictures, with their tough studly heroes and sense of doom – in particular, it’s reminiscent of the Alain Delon/Jean Pierre-Melville movie Le Samouraï(1967).
Le Samouraï also heavily influenced Hill’s later The Driver and the most fascinating thing about reading Lloyd Williams is to observe the presence of themes/devices to which Hill would repeatedly return throughout his career: old Hollywood genres mixed with foreign film sensibility (The Driver, Last Man Standing, Southern Comfort, his unmade Killer script), a taciturn female lead (most famously exemplified with Ripley in Alien but also Hard Times, The Driver, Streets of Fire), the buddy combination of two men, one of whom is stoic while the other more chatty (Hard Times, 48 Hours, Bullet to the Head, Red Heat), a shifty double-crossing gang boss, an extensive action sequence involving a train station (The Getaway, The Drivers, The Warriors, Streets of Fire), a big fight at the end with a worthy opponent (Hard Times, Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Bullet to the Head, Undisputed). There is also the lack of a third act twist/obstacle to make things more difficult for the hero – like a few other Hill movies, it’s a little too easy for the protagonist to win his fights. (It’s not as problematic here though, because Lloyd’s brother dies.)
Lloyd Williams and His Brother is a very good script and not hard to see how it launched Hill’s career – as an artist, he arrived almost fully formed. If it took him a couple of years to crack that first script, it was time well spent.
