Word: richert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by William Richert...
Screenplay by William Richert and Larry Cohen...
...William Richert, a novice writerdirector, strode out of Closetland with a pair of black-comic fantasias on the lust for power: Winter Kills and Success. What happened next would fulfill a paranoid's darkest hopes. With all the good grace of a Mafia don consigning a nosy reporter to cement sneakers in the East River, Hollywood offhandedly dumped Richert's films. Winter Kills, which twisted an assassination scenario into high-voltage satire, was pulled from release after a few weeks. Success, a screwball comedy on the doppelganger theme, was left to molder in its distributor's vaults...
...ballet before her favorite companion, a full-length mirror. So Harry gives himself another life, in the guise of a swaggering gangster named Mack. Suddenly, love and the perfect swindle are his for the daring. This is a cynical fairy tale that must be told with buoyancy of spirit; Richert's gift is for earthbound madness. The best that can be said for Success is that it allowed him to complete the filming of Winter Kills...
Richard Condon's 1974 novel Winter Kills took off from the shooting of John Kennedy and flew into an orbit of conspiratorial delirium that made the flakiest assassination theories seem like whitewash. Richert's film starts off from Condon, streamlines the plot and adds a few new quirks. Nineteen years after the event, Nick Kegan (Bridges) follows a zig-zag trail of clues, threats and intuitions to find out who killed his President brother. But who will help him? His father (John Huston), a wily priapic megamillionaire who lopes through his several palaces in flaming red Jockey shorts...