Skip to main content
Winter Kills film image; surprised man leaning over something

Winter Kills

35mm Print

Total Cinema

This event has passed

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

Director

William Richert

Cast

Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Belinda Bauer, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Elizabeth Taylor

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

1979

Language

English

19+
97 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

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

Come and See

Dir. Elem Klimov
142 min

One of the most powerful war films ever made, Elem Klimov's Come and See is an overwhelming and unforgettable experience.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

The Fall (4K Restoration)

Dir. Tarsem Singh
119 min

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!

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Fight Club (25th Anniversary)

Dir. David Fincher
139 min

1999 was a very good year for movies, but nothing captured millennial angst quite so vividly as David Fincher's bruising black comedy about what it means to be a man today. This modern classic does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Starship Troopers

Dir. Paul Verhoeven
129 min

It's Earth vs Space Bugs in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action splatter fest, which also doubles as a savagely satiric send up of dumb American fascism.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre