In the wake of the multiple political assassinations that ripped across the United States in the 1960s, conspiracy movies found a febrile, paranoid audience eager to entertain speculative explanations. Novelist Richard Condon anticipated the zeitgeist with his Cold War brainwashing thriller The Manchurian Candidate (the movie was released during the Bay of Pigs).
Published in 1974, Winter Kills riffs on the JFK assassination, pointing to a second gunman and a (now familiar) nexus of mafia and anti-Castro Cubans behind the trigger-men. It’s hard to credit that William Richert’s astonishing movie version really exists in the world, and the more you learn about its production and (miniscule) release, the stronger that feeling becomes. The cast alone is mind-boggling: Jeff Bridges, John Huston as a Joe Kennedy figure, noir veterans Sterling Hayden and Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Malone, and Anthony Perkins as all-seeing, all-knowing John Cerrutti, a kind of cross between J Edgar Hoover, Big Brother, and (we might think) Mark Zuckerberg. Then there’s the crew: cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Days of Heaven), production designer Robert Boyle (North by Northwest), composer Maurice Jarre (Dr Zhivago). Not bad for a first time filmmaker who had never touched a 35mm camera before. The movie is flawed, funny, and fascinating. It’s also that perfect storm, a paranoia movie that might just have been suppressed by its own distributor to protect a subsidiary’s defence department contracts.
This new 35mm print, the first struck in over 40 years, was supervised by legendary cinematographer John Bailey, the movie’s camera operator. Bailey also photographed additional scenes a year later when Vilmos Zsigmond was unavailable.
A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Winter Kills is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.
J Hoberman, The New York Times
Riotously entertaining, chilling perceptive.
Slant
Richert positions the lurid plot as absurdist comedy without losing sight of its high historical stakes.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Media Partner
William Richert
Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Belinda Bauer, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Elizabeth Taylor
USA
1979
English
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
William Richert
Cinematography
Vilmos Zsigmond
Editor
David Bretherton
Original Music
Maurice Jarre
Production Design
Robert F. Boyle
Art Director
Norman Newberry
Also in This Series
The Conversation
Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, 'the best bugger on the West Coast', a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
The Fall (4K Restoration)
Shot over four years across 24 countries, cowritten by a six year old girl, and entirely self-financed by commercials director Tarsem, The Fall is such a mind- (and eye) boggling movie it's hard to believe it actually exists. Yet here it is!
Winter Kills
An inspired black comic adaptation of the ultimate conspiracy theory, based on a novel by Richard (Manchurian Candidate) Condon. It's a lunatic riff on the Kennedy assassination(s), with Jeff Bridges finding who really killed his brother, the President. Screening in 35mm print.
