By Erin Free
Though a notably wild and iconoclastic figure with a small cult of followers and a sizeable part to play in film and popular culture, the relatively limited output of the late, great and sadly lamented William Richert has seen the cache of this singularly fascinating writer, producer and director unfairly diminished since his drop-off from filmmaking in the late nineties and his subsequent passing in 2022 at the age of 79. And though he only has one truly great film on his resume in the kaleidoscopic cult classic that is 1979’s Winter Kills, it’s a film that offers so much that it’s impossible not to imagine the kinds of films William Richert would have conjured if afforded more opportunity and industry support.
Born in 1942 in Florida, William Richert’s creative audacity and chutzpah was evidenced from an early age, when at just nineteen he interviewed US President Richard Nixon’s daughters, Tricia and Julie, for a planned documentary to be entitled The President’s Daughters. Though this didn’t pan out, William Richert did indeed get a number of similarly provocative and interesting docos off the ground, producing director Robert Kaylor’s 1972 work Derby (about the burgeoning sport of roller derby) and making his own directorial debut with 1972’s A Dancer’s Life, which looks at the personal and professional lives of aspiring dancers at New York’s American Ballet Theatre School. Throughout the 1970s, Richert spent most of his time as a screenwriter, adapting Xaviera Hollander’s notorious novel for director Nicholas Sgarro’s 1975 hit The Happy Hooker (about a Dutch prostitute’s adventures in New York), and finding himself amongst a large cast of writers on émigré Ivan Passer’s Law And Disorder (1974) and Crime And Passion (1976).
In 1979, William Richert wrote and directed his true opus with Winter Kills, a wonderfully gonzo take on the JFK assassination and the bizarre (and not so bizarre) conspiracy theories that have swirled around it ever since The Commander In Chief got wacked in Dallas. Working from a book by novelist William Condon (The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi’s Honor), Richert crafts a warped, labyrinthine tale of paranoia and political malfeasance as Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges, superb as always), the younger half-brother of assassinated US President Timothy Kegan, goes through the looking glass and into a bizarre world of great power and even greater corruption after the deathbed confessions of a man claiming to be a second player in the assassination. As the somewhat hapless Nick pings and bounces around like a pinball, he slams into a succession of profoundly weird figures (played with gusto by fully into-it vets like Sterling Hayden, Anthony Perkins, Ralph Meeker, Eli Wallach and more, as well as, yes, Elizabeth Taylor) connected to his brother’s assassination, while his very, very loopy and wholly venal father (John Huston’s decade-ending performance is rivalled only by his own decade-beginning performance in 1970’s Myra Breckinridge) lords over it all.
So strange, so ahead of its time (but truly of its time), so defiantly iconoclastic, and so singularly strange, Winter Kills is really a film unto itself, and is the obvious work of a true auteur, but one never really able to truly take flight. Winter Kills has garnered a cult following over the years, with buff-of-renown Quentin Tarantino presenting a restored US season of the film in 2023. If what happens on the screen in Winter Kills is enough to justify a well-deserved cult, what happened off-screen during its production is the stuff of cloaked Hollywood legend. In short, two of the film’s principal producers went bankrupt, with one being later sent to a federal prison for drug trafficking and the other murdered by a creditor. Production on the film was shut down for two years due to financial difficulties, which saw Richert make another film in the interim, the distribution rights of which were sold to fund the completion of Winter Kills.
Further proof that Richert’s career was like that of no other filmmaker, the stop-gap film made principally to improve the fortunes of another is a winning bizarro curio in its own oddball right. From a script by the great Larry Cohen (the famed low budget legend had written it with an eye to Rock Hudson and Vanessa Redgrave starring), 1980’s The American Success Company saw Richert co-opt his Winter Kills stars Jeff Bridges and Belinda Bauer for this biting satire shot in Germany, of all places. Bridges is sensational as the harried and humiliated Harry Flowers, who finally gets fed up of being pushed around at work (Ned Beatty brings it big time as his boss) and at home (where he is married to his bullying boss’s difficult daughter, played by Aussie-born Belinda Bauer), and hires a prostitute (the astoundingly exotic and unconventional Bianca Jagger) to assist him in getting a little revenge. A canny, stylish, and very inventive take-down of America’s obsession with money and power that also punctures concepts of machismo and winning at all costs, The American Success Company is an excellent satire long hobbled by a bizarre release history, with the film re-released and re-edited (by Richert himself) several times under a variety of titles, including The Ringer and Success.
William Richert only worked intermittently after the strange double-shot of Winter Kills and The American Success Company, with only two more credits to his name. Written and directed by Richert, 1988’s A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon was sold as a teen comedy, but is a lot smarter and way more interesting than its placement in that much maligned genre may suggest. The tale of a teenage womaniser (the late River Phoenix, who would become something of a touchstone in Richert’s life) trying to avoid being sent to business school, the film is based on Richert’s 1966 novel Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye and takes a typically curious bent on gender relations and the misplaced energy of youth. Somewhat typically of Richert’s oeuvre, the film was tampered with by backing studio 20th Century Fox, whose vision of the project was considerably different to the director’s.
Richert’s final film as director was 1998’s barely released The Face Of Alexandre Dumas: The Man In The Iron Mask, a retelling of the classic novel starring Edward Albert and Timothy Bottoms. Richert also made a minor impact as an actor, notably appearing as the Fagin-like mentor Bob Pigeon in Gus Van Sant’s 1991 cult fave My Own Private Idaho. Richert consolidated his friendship with River Phoenix here, and the director had long been planning a documentary based around the actor’s “wrongful death” up until his own passing. Set to be explosive and controversial, the doco likely would have matched some of Richert’s other off-screen activity, with the filmmaker infamously (and unsuccessfully) suing not just noted screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for plagiarism (Richert claimed that Sorkin ripped off his 1981 script The President Elopes for his works The American President and The West Wing), but also The Directors Guild Of America, ostensibly over its collection of overseas levies for American directors who are not members of the guild.
A wild, unconventional talent like no other, William Richert’s legacy of wondrous weirdness and satirical brilliance should be celebrated high and low, and long and loud, at every possible opportunity.
Winter Kills will screen in a special 45th Anniversary presentation at The Inner West Film Fest on Saturday, April 13 at 4:00pm at Palace Norton Street. Click here for all information and to buy tickets.
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