Winter Kills

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

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