Death Valley (Dick Richards, 1982)

Dick Richards is one of those filmmakers who should be better known, but the reasons for his obscurity are understandable. His filmography is small, each one is in a different genre, none were big hits or era-defining touchstones (except for a film he produced and another one he was fired from before it started shooting), and he hasn't directed anything since 1986. The three I've seen show a director with an eye for strong images and visual detail (no boring shots that are there just to move the plot along) and a sensitivity to character and performance, even in a movie like Death Valley where the characters aren't particularly fleshed out on the page. He also finds great locations that really pop on the screen (both interiors and exteriors), and his art directors and set decorators do a pretty amazing job.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Richards got his start as a photographer, which is apparent in his filmmaking style. His photography work eventually led to him directing TV commercials, and he got the chance to make movies in the early '70s, debuting with the western The Culpepper Cattle Co. in 1972. The movie made a small profit and put him on Hollywood executives' radar, and he was hired to direct Jaws. Unfortunately, his odd habit of referring to the shark as a "whale" in several meetings greatly irritated the producers and author Peter Benchley, and Richards was dumped for a young hotshot named Steven Spielberg.

That may have been bad for Richards' long-term career, but he rebounded with two excellent if not as world-changing films in 1975, a beautifully eccentric comedy-drama road movie with Alan Arkin, Sally Kellerman, and Mackenzie Phillips called Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins and a neo-noir Raymond Chandler adaptation, Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling. Harry Dean Stanton is in both movies, for my fellow Stanton heads out there. He followed that double header with the 1977 war movie March or Die, took a five-year hiatus, and returned with his only horror film, Death Valley. (More on that later, obviously.) That same year, Richards was a producer on the massive hit Tootsie, a movie he'd cowritten an early draft of and worked hard to make happen. Originally planning to direct as well as produce, he butted heads with the studio over creative choices and turned the directing job over to Sydney Pollack. I wonder what a Dick Richards Tootsie and a Dick Richards Jaws would have looked like.

The rest of his too-slim directorial credits include the 1983 family melodrama Man, Woman and Child and the 1986 Burt Reynolds action movie Heat, a troubled production that saw original director Robert Altman (yes, Altman was going to make a Burt Reynolds action movie after being convinced by mutual friend Carol Burnett) quitting because his preferred cinematographer, Pierre Mignot, was having trouble getting a visa to work in the United States. (Altman also hated the script.) Richards replaced Altman, but Richards and Reynolds did not get along, to put it mildly. Richards quit after Reynolds punched him, and Jerry Jameson took over as director number three. The production remained chaotic, apologies were made, and Richards returned to the film but had to quit for a second time when he fell off a crane and injured himself, requiring hospitalization. Jameson came back and two other uncredited directors also worked on the film, raising the director total to five. The film was edited without input from Richards, multiple lawsuits ensued, and Richards was credited as R.M. Richards in the finished product. He hasn't worked in film since, and, considering he's 88, he probably won't again.

OK, I'm finally going to talk about the movie, six paragraphs in. Death Valley is an intriguing blend of slasher horror, suspense thriller, family drama, and road movie that opens briefly in New York City before moving to the Arizona and California deserts. The characters in Richard Rothstein's (co-creator of sometimes spooky/sometimes silly HBO series The Hitchhiker) screenplay are a little thin, and this movie would probably be great instead of just good if we had the chance to get to know these people in more depth, but the actors and Richards do a whole lot with the little they're given. They give the whole thing a lived-in quality that's not always present in the words.

The film opens in Manhattan, with little Billy (A Christmas Story's Peter Billingsley) visiting multiple notable New York spots with his father Paul (veteran character actor Edward Herrmann in a cameo role), a professor at Princeton. Billy's parents are recently divorced, and his mother Sally (Child's Play's Catherine Hicks) has started a new relationship with a man from her small, Death Valley-adjacent California hometown, Mike (Melvin and Howard's Paul Le Mat), and is strongly considering moving back home. In hopes of getting Mike and Billy to bond and for her little New York boy to warm up to the idea of moving to the desert, she and Mike arrange for a road trip vacation from Death Valley to  Arizona. Billy is not wild about leaving Manhattan or seeing some rube who's not his dad spend time with his mother, so he gives poor Mike the business as soon as the trip begins.

Speaking of giving people the business, an Arizona serial killer is starting to get active again. After he slices up a party animal doofus, a babe in short shorts and tube top, and their sleeping buddy in an RV, Billy comes across the scene while exploring the landscape with Sally and Mike. He fortunately does not see the dead bodies, but he does pocket a distinctive gold medallion and also sees parked near the RV the very creepy 1958 Cadillac with the "HEX 576" license plate that had followed and passed them on the highway earlier that day.

Soon, the killer (or killers?) realizes the boy has seen the car, and he decides to take out little Billy. He pursues the trio through the Arizona landscape, and Richards finds all kinds of great locations in the deserts, rock formations, roadside motels, and tourist traps along the way. I love the way Richards films these landscapes and the motel interiors. His photographer's eye is especially strong in these scenes.

The dialogue is mostly basic and perfunctory, except for a handful of scenes, and the characters don't get the fullness they deserve, but they all have a relaxed naturalness that lifts up the lack of spice in the dialogue. Billingsley is a great child actor with an expressive face and he and Hicks have a believable mother-son rapport. Le Mat is maybe too relaxed in the climactic scenes but is such a believable average Joe, and we also get great supporting work from Stephen McHattie and Wilford Brimley (here billed as A. Wilford Brimley, maybe because when you see him show up a third of the way into the running time, you say, "Ayyyyyyy, Wilford Brimley!")

I like this movie a lot. It definitely has its flaws (mostly in the writing), but it has a a great visual style, a solid cast, a compelling story, and real tension and suspense, and it's beautifully lit. The craftsmanship on display practically makes me weep with rage at how shitty most 21st century movies and TV shows look. I also love the detail and character of the early '80s locations, and again I'm nearly weeping with rage at how bland and uniform so much of our landscape has become in this century of slop. You've heard me rant about this before, so I'll stop now. Death Valley is no neglected masterpiece, but it's a solid, entertaining, well-made movie full of unusual and pleasing visual detail, and that's more than alright with me. 

Tower of London (Rowland V. Lee, 1939)

1939 was a busy year for filmmaker Rowland V. Lee. After Son of Frankenstein (reviewed on this site last month), he made the drama The Sun Never Sets before returning to the darker stuff with Tower of London, an epic but concise fictionalized historical action-drama with plenty of horror movie elements and Son of Frankenstein cast members Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, with added Vincent Price. 

Like Son of Frankenstein, it's an emotionally and narratively complex story skillfully told, with charismatic actors who, true or not, look like they're having the time of their lives. It was a passion project for Lee, who had been planning it for years. I had a great time with it.

The feeble king of England, Henry VI (Miles Mander), has been deposed by King Edward IV (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) and locked up in the Tower of London, albeit in a comfortable room, unlike many of the other prisoners, who are shackled and tortured by the chief executioner and head of the prison guards, Mord (Boris Karloff), a bald, club-footed beast of a man who spends his downtime sharpening his blades with a raven on his shoulder and inflicting the aforementioned torture. As our lame duck president once said about Corn Pop, Mord is a bad dude. (The election was horrifying, the country is toast, both major parties are moral failures, nothing I can say about it here will be enjoyable, I hope a better system rises from the ashes or a meteor hits us, back to the movie.)

Henry's brother, Richard (Basil Rathbone), the duke of Gloucester, is a treacherous, scheming little freak who wants the throne and is willing to do anything to get it, often in cahoots with the bloodthirsty Mord. Richard has a secret dollhouse with a doll for each person in the line of succession. When he succeeds at removing the obstacle, the doll is chucked into his fireplace with much glee. 

Those obstacles include Henry, his own brother Edward, Edward's two young sons, the prince of Wales (G.P. Huntley) (he wants to snag the prince's wife, Anne Neville, played by Rose Hobart, who was the subject of a fascinating early experimental film by Joseph Cornell), the queen's cousin John Wyatt (John Sutton), and the Duke of Clarence (Vincent Price). Richard has everyone fooled except for Queen Elyzabeth (Barbara O'Neil), who has a visceral distrust of the man and is especially unnerved when he spends time with her sons. (Also in 1939, O'Neil played Scarlett O'Hara's mother in Gone with the Wind despite being only three years older than Vivien Leigh.) We also get substantial supporting parts for Nan Grey as Lady Alice Barton, John Wyatt's betrothed, and Ernest Cossart as Tom Clink, a sassy chimney sweep who gets mixed up in the intrigue.

This cast has the juice, as the perpetually online like to say. Rathbone, Hunter, Karloff, Sutton, Cossart, and Price tear into these roles, and O'Neil gets a surprising amount to do despite her more grounded part. (She's basically the straight woman for a bunch of wild dudes.) Hunter plays King Edward as a politically effective but goofy party animal in it for the good times and the prestige of power, lacking in empathy and easily manipulated by Richard. He's hilarious and knows how to ham it up just enough without wearing out his welcome. 

Karloff's role is pretty one-note but exceedingly memorable in its physicality and menace, and he's a major reason the film works as a horror film as well as a historical drama. Price and Rathbone are fantastic and immensely skilled at nailing that sweet spot between sincerity and camp. The scene where the two men have a wine-drinking contest to determine the fate of the duke's fortune is one of the great two-person scenes. Price would later play Rathbone's part in Roger Corman's 1962 remake of this movie, which also incorporated some of Shakespeare's Richard III.

Director Lee, so adept at handling the complex, competing interests of his characters in Son of Frankenstein, is equally adept at taking on the large canvas here, which includes all the palace intrigue in the tower, the love and family lives of multiple sets of characters, murders, executions, several exciting swordfights, and two epic battle scenes. He manages all this in just over ninety minutes, without letting the pace drag or hurrying the action along too swiftly. Nearly every major character is explored in depth, and even the minor characters get their moments. Lee had a reputation for going over schedule and over budget, but he got results. (He was also one of the founders of the Directors Guild of America, which was originally called the Screen Directors Guild, a union protecting filmmakers' rights.)

I don't know if 1939 was just a fluke or if most Lee films are as solid as Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London. If they are, I definitely need to dip into the catalog. Based on the two films of his I've seen, the dude had the goods. Lee retired from filmmaking in 1945, with the Charles Laughton-starring swashbuckler Captain Kidd his last movie as director. He spent the rest of his life ranching in the San Fernando Valley, though he turned part of the ranch into filming location property and rented it out to productions, including Laughton's only film as director, the masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, and continued to sell parts of it to developers for corporate offices and family homes. He made a short-lived return to the movies with the Biblical epic The Big Fisherman in 1959, producing and cowriting the screenplay but hiring Frank Borzage to direct. He died in 1975.