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.