King of the Hill is a 1993 film, Steven Soderbergh's third feature film, and the second he directed from his own screenplay following his 1989 Palme d'Or-winning effort Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It too was nominated for the Palme d'Or, at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A.E. Hotchner, it follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a fleabag hotel in St. Louis while his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis and his father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch... Company. He is off on long trips from which the boy can't be certain he will ever return. The film is distinctive in part because the antagonists who drive much of the plot are relatively mild by cinematic standards. The two primary ones — a cop on his beat and a hotel porter — share the characteristic of taking joy and pride in sadistically enforcing the property rights of the rich against the poor.
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