The death of American director Richard Rush

Should we take Richard Rush’s cinema seriously? His filmography is disparate and heterogeneous, sparse but spread over three decades with long moments of inactivity (no film between 1974 and 1980, then between 1980 and 1993). It is made up of works that are difficult to link together, some rather conventional, others affirming a desire for more personal expression. The filmmaker died on April 8 in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

It is at the heart of a marginal production system, next to the big studios, that he will begin his career as a director.

He was born on April 15, 1929 in New York. He studied at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which had just opened its cinema department, before working for the army, for which he produced television programs on the engagement of the United States in the Korean War. But it is at the heart of a marginal production system, alongside the big studios, that he will truly begin his career as a director. Rush frequents this pool of talents made up of the actors and collaborators of films produced by Roger Corman and distributed by AIP, B series representative of an exploitation cinema appreciated by a teenage audience, which then seeks to stand out from adults. Precisely, Too Soon to Love, his first feature film, in 1960, is a melodrama about a couple of very young lovers confronted with an unwanted pregnancy.

Read also: The madness of “The Stunt Man”, by Richard Rush, at the Montreal World Film Festival,

In 1967 Return of the angels from hell, which is a Roger Corman production, is part of this successful biker film series launched by the Angels of Hell, by Daniel Haller a few months earlier. The main role is played by a young rising actor, Jack Nicholson. Rush is still making series films for Corman with Thunder alley (1967) on stock car races or else The Seven Savages, the following year, another biker movie. He will keep a special memory of these years of low-budget productions: “All these films were shot in thirteen days for around $ 100,000. We worked seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. It was complicated, exhausting and exhilarating, but it built character. “

Three Oscar nominations

But Rush, at that time, beyond his participation in a genre cinema, demonstrated an interest in the margins of American society and counter-culture, which the Corman and AIP productions partially embodied. Psych-Out, in 1968, immersed in the hippie district of San Francisco, appealed to a whole generation of comedians in the making, a veritable band eager to make a place for themselves in Hollywood: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Susan Strasberg, Dean Stockwell. This interest in the counter-culture will also be expressed in his first film, shot in 1970, for a large studio, Columbia: Campus or CQFD, with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, the story of a university professor, Vietnam veteran, discovering the student protest movement.

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