DVD - Mean and lean

The Walter Hill Collection Optimum, £37.50

WITH MOST MODERN ACTION films little more than glorified B-movies full of explosions and CGI where the plots should be, it's always useful to return to the early work of Walter Hill, just to see how much more effective no-nonsense direction, lean scripts and stripped down set-pieces can be at getting the blood pumping.

Hill got his break writing scripts for Sam Peckinpah and working as an assistant director on Steve McQueen films, so it's perhaps unsurprising that his best movies from the 1970s and 1980s exhibited the kind of efficiency that genre films did in the heyday of the studio system. Hill's disciplined film-making style allowed him to deliver the kind of muscular thrills someone like Robert Aldrich might have managed had he come of age in an era with a more relaxed attitude to screen violence.

As such, Hill has never really been regarded as an auteur. He wasn't one of the movie brats trying to tear the system down from within, yet the likes of The Driver, The Warriors and Southern Comfort have become classics in their own right, providing a bridge between the commercial pap the studios churned out during this period and the grittier stuff they let Scorsese, Coppola and the rest of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls generation get away with. All three of those films can be found in The Walter Hill Collection and watching them again demonstrates how extraordinarily well made they are. Hill's style might not be flashy, but it's alive to the pulpy origins of the stories he was telling, which ensures they have a freshness that transcends their derivative premises and the fashions of the day.

Indeed 1978's The Driver, perhaps the least well known of this triptych, has actually improved with age, with Ryan O'Neal's then pretty-boy status no longer getting in the way of his performance as a getaway driver for hire engaged in a game of cat-and-rat with Bruce Dern's rodent-like cop.

It also proves that The French Connection doesn't have dibs on the greatest car chase of all time – at least three of the best are to be found here.

I've written columns on The Warriors and Southern Comfort before, but this collection also includes 1980's The Long Riders, a very decent stab at the Jesse James story and Hill's first Western (he would later direct the undervalued Geronimo as well as the pilot of Deadwood).

Rounding it out are two of his films from the late 1980s: Extreme Prejudice and Johnny Handsome. The latter is the least effective film here, but does demonstrate Hill's skills with actors and he coaxes two fantastic early performances from Forest Whitaker and Morgan Freeman, a doctor and a cop arguing over the fate of Mickey Rourke's horribly deformed criminal. Extreme Prejudice, meanwhile, is a further reminder that even in a guns-blazing 1980s action film, Hill was unwilling to ditch the plot and throw money at the set pieces. That makes him something of an anomaly by contemporary Hollywood standards, which is maybe why he's directed fewer and fewer pictures over the last 20 years.

The good news is he might be about to make a return. In a rare interview included in this boxset, he says he's got two scripts ready to go. And with a Tony Scott-directed remake of The Warriors threatened for 2010, it's not a moment too soon.