The movie Bill Paxton called the most important of his career: “Significant in different ways”
If you can think of Bill Paxton and not exclaim, “Game over, man! Game over!” in your head, you’re a more well-rounded cinephile than most people.
After all, Paxton’s performance as the future’s most panicked space marine in James Cameron’s Aliens has gone down in cinema folklore over the years.
During the 1980s and ’90s, Paxton almost seemed to be Cameron’s lucky charm, popping up in small but pivotal roles in The Terminator, True Lies, and Titanic, in addition to battling the terrifying xenomorphs.
Interestingly, though, Paxton doesn’t consider any of his Cameron films to be the most important movie of his career. Instead, that honour belongs to a little-seen crime thriller that might not have made much of a splash at the box office, but paid off for him in other ways.
“There were a lot of films that were significant in different ways for me,” Paxton told Entertainment Weekly in 2017, not long before his tragic passing. “But One False Move was the movie that Ron Howard had seen me in that led to Apollo 13, and it was also the movie that Jan de Bont saw me in, that led to me being cast in Twister.”
Indeed, One False Move is one of those films few people have seen, but those who have will sing its praises from the rooftops. A down-and-dirty crime movie directed by Carl Franklin, who would later make Devil in a Blue Dress and Out of Time with Denzel Washington, the film told the tale of three criminals who flee from Los Angeles to rural Arkansas after committing a series of drug murders.
There, they encounter Paxton’s Dale ‘Hurricane’ Dixon, a small-town sheriff excited to take them down because it means he can finally do “some real police work”. Naturally, the whole thing ends in violence and bloodshed, but the film’s script makes that violence mean something because it is all shot through with themes of race relations, gender discussions, and city versus rural life.
Paxton was always extremely proud of One False Move, and it’s easy to see why, considering it is the very movie Howard and De Bont saw that convinced them he was right for their megahit films. However, it likely also holds a very special place in his heart because it was the first movie that saw him trusted with leading man duties, after years of being an eye-catching supporting player.
Indeed, Franklin revealed he had to reassure Paxton that he had the chops to be the film’s protagonist, and that he didn’t necessarily need to show everything he could do as an actor in each scene. Instead, he needed to trust himself more as a performer.
“In some instances, it wasn’t necessary for him to do a lot more than what he needed to do,” Franklin told SlashFilm in 2023. “That his presence was really strong, and to just cut back a little bit…It’s just getting him to pull back and just trust the fact that he’s a leading man. He is and he was.”
Finally, there is one more reason Paxton may have a soft spot for One False Move. The film was co-written by none other than Billy Bob Thornton, who broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter before making it as an actor. He had a small role in the movie, too, and six years later, he and Paxton reunited for another neo-noir classic, A Simple Plan, directed by Sam Raimi. Thornton landed a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar nomination for that film, where he played Paxton’s brother. To this day, it takes pride of place among Paxton’s enviable parade of modern classics.
