From the start, British-born director Alex Cox and Hollywood were destined to be at loggerheads. Of his first four features, three were studio releases, although it would be more accurate to say they escaped. (The exception, 1987’s Straight to Hell, was independently financed, a harbinger of how the balance of his career would play out.)
Cult favorite Repo Man cost $1.5 million on a negative pickup deal executive producer Michael Nesmith negotiated with Universal Pictures, which promptly buried it. Cox’s follow-up, Sid and Nancy, was made for $4 million and distributed by the Samuel Goldwyn Company, which failed to recoup its investment. And Walker, which Universal backed to the tune of $5.6 million, was essentially orphaned, putting an end to his relationship with the studios. In the decades since, Cox has met the challenge of financing his idiosyncratic films on his own terms, operating outside a mainstream he never truly felt comfortable in. The boldly postmodern Walker is simply proof that going against the grain was always his default setting.
Drawn to the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, Cox was invited to make a film there and brought screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) on board to draft the script. Instead of a contemporary story, they chose as their subject the US’s first misadventure in Central America, centered on William Walker, a long-forgotten historical figure who led a ragtag group of mercenaries in a quixotic invasion of the country in the 1850s. Over its increasingly surreal and chaotic 94 minutes, Walker upends all the expectations of the historical epic, fashioning a poison-pen letter to the twin concepts of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
One of the keys to its success is the casting of Ed Harris in the leading role. No stranger to playing charismatic, if slightly cracked, visionaries (see also: his King Billy in George A. Romero’s Knightriders), Harris is fearless even when his character is not. Cox and Wurlitzer take every opportunity to undercut their ostensible hero, and Harris isn’t afraid to make himself look utterly foolish and misguided.
Aiding Harris is a cast drawn from veterans of Cox’s earlier films (chief among them, Sy Richardson as Walker’s right-hand man and Xander Berkeley as a journalist along for the ride) with some new faces, including Peter Boyle (as the odious Cornelius Vanderbilt), Richard Masur (as his go-between), and René Auberjonois (as one of Walker’s frazzled military advisors). The two strongest characters in the film, however, are the women in Walker’s life. First up is Marlee Matlin (in her first role after winning the Best Actress Oscar for Children of a Lesser God) as his deaf lover Ellen Martin, whose influence over Walker is such that he feels cast adrift when she dies of cholera. Just as formidable is Blanca Guerra as Guatemalan aristocrat Doña Yrena, who manipulates Walker to her own purposes, but finds him too unpredictable to pin down.
Walker proved challenging to critics as well, sharply dividing them at the time of its release. One thing it got dinged for was the deliberate anachronisms Cox and Wurlitzer slipped into the narrative to draw attention to the connections between past and present. Some of the more amusing ones are Walker’s appearances on the covers of Newsweek, People, and Time, but the pièce de résistance is the chopper that airlifts his few surviving men to safety at the end of the film, an echo of the fall of Saigon the previous decade. It continues to resonate, with Cox pointing out the parallels with the Iraq War, then ongoing, when he recorded his commentary for the Criterion DVD in 2008. Since Universal did all it could to suppress Walker, the size of its cultural footprint is largely attributable to Criterion’s efforts to rehabilitate it, eventually giving it a well-deserved Blu-ray upgrade in 2022.
In the meantime, Cox got on with it, making well-regarded (if little-seen) films in Mexico (Highway Patrolman and Death and the Compass) and his native Liverpool (Three Businessmen and Revengers Tragedy). Another close call with Hollywood came when he worked on an adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that ultimately fell through. He and partner Tod Davies retained a screenplay credit on the version eventually made by Terry Gilliam, which was released by – wait for it – Universal. He even did a film for Roger Corman – 2007’s Searchers 2.0 – which is the sort of thing most directors get out of their system at the beginning of their career.
To date, Cox’s last completed feature is 2017’s Tombstone Rashomon, which like its two predecessors (Repo Chick and Bill the Galactic Hero) raised its lean budget through crowdfunding. While it’s played relatively straight – the mock-documentary framing aside, this is the closest Cox has come to making a classic western – there’s a definite nod to Walker’s anachronisms when the Earps and Doc Holliday hop in a police car and drive to their showdown at the O.K. Corral. Hey, if you’re going to steal, might as well be from yourself.
Many of Alex Cox’s films can be found on various streaming services. “Walker” is not among them, but it is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
