In fifteen or 20 years, even people who are pretty well informed won't understand William Richert's 1979 Winter Kills. The allusions are fading even now. Winter Kills is a bitter satire that takes as its theme the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (In the film, the Kennedy family is named "Keegan" and the president, Tim, was shot in Philadelphia in 1960, that is 19 years before the events shown in the movie.) For viewers without the requisite knowledge, Winter Kills will seem like some kind of paranoid fantasy because, of course, the truth about the Kennedy family often beggars the imagination -- the real facts are more salacious and bizarre than anything a screenwriter could imagine. But the film, although compulsively entertaining, doesn't really stand on its own -- without the scandalous references, the whole thing loses its bite.
Jeff Bridges, a beautiful boy in this film, is the male scion of the Keegan family, downwardly mobile and working on one of his father's merchant ships. A horribly injured oil rig worker is helicoptered onto the vessel and, as he dies, confesses that he was the second shooter involved in the conspiracy to kill the President 19 years earlier. The dying assassin offers proof: his rifle is still hidden in a building in Philadelphia. The sailor travels to Philadelphia, finds the gun, and, then, people around him start dying -- by sniper-fire, in mysterious crashes, by poison and explosion. In each case, the young man is spared. Reporting periodically to his father, the family's patriarch played with nightmarish authority by John Huston, the young man penetrates deeper and deeper into a network of sleazy gangsters, tavern owners, Cuban dissidents, and movie studio executives. At each level, he finds trapdoors leading to lower, and more corrupt, motives for the killing -- although ultimately most of what he discovers is a distraction away from the real villain. The viewer, of course, schooled in this sort of plot by films like Orson Welles Mr. Arkadin realizes, almost immediately, that the puppet-master controlling this underworld of conspirators is, of course, the old man, the father of the dead president and the hero -- the surrealistically rich patriarch of the family is, in effect, using his son to cover the trail that leads to him as the person who engineered the killing. But there is a final twist that complicates this aspect of the plot and establishes the film's truly paranoid bona fides. (The movie's surprise ending shows an affinity with the equally paranoid and, even more bizarre, film starring James Coburn, The President's Analyst, a curiosity so strange that it shouldn't even exist.)
Winter Kills is based on an once well-known novel by Richard Condon and is briskly directed and paced. The movie is prescient on many levels -- there are discussions of the use of hormones to raise chickens ("these chickens are all high on speed") and the old man owns "26 hospitals" -- "the real money is in health care." In the TV series Silicon Valley, the arrogance of a villain, Gavin Belson, is shown by the fact that the man has a "blood boy", someone who transfuses his youthful and vibrant blood into the veins of the middle-aged tycoon -- this seemed novel and horrifying to me when I saw this a couple weeks ago. In Winter Kills, the Keegan patriarch has all of his blood replaced by blood from younger people once every six months -- we see him lounging in a huge bed in a hospital room tricked-out like a chamber in a baronial manor, beautiful half-dressed nurses feeding him sugar pastries. (SPOILER ALERT: the trick ending is about to be revealed.) The ultimate boss to whom old man Keegan is beholding is someone named Cerruti, an information systems bureaucrat played by a gaunt, and half-crazed-looking Anthony Perkins. Cerruti lives like in a "rathole in the Bronx", but he manages a vast, planet-wide surveillance system that has collected data on everyone on earth -- in effect, Cerruti is the chairman of the Board and CEO of Google, manipulating data from a vast, hidden fortress full of electronic files, weather maps, and blinking computers. Everyone turns out to be complicit in the conspiracy -- Hollywood wanted the President killed because his negligence resulted in the death of a starlet (Marilyn Monroe?) whose screen presence was worth "50 million a year." The mob wanted Keegan killed for welshing on debts; the Cubans were mad about Cuba and the FBI and CIA seem to have looked the other way when Joe Diamond (Jack Ruby) and his associates were bribed to install shooters along the path of the presidential motorcade. Even old man Keegan, who seems all-powerful, is a thrall to the information empire managed by Cerruti -- in the end, he falls out of his downtown Penthouse, dangling from a vast American flag spread across the side of Trump Tower. Before he falls, he tells Jeff Bridges to remove all his money from "the Western World" and invest it in "Brazil."
A film of this kind, featuring a quest through an increasingly febrile underworld, relies heavily on its supporting cast -- the show needs lots of colorful monsters. And Winter Kills doesn't disappoint in this regard -- Richard Boone, who is always wonderful, is one of the monsters; Sterling Hayden plays a crazed military contractor; Eli Wallach impersonates Jack Ruby; Anthony Perkins rants and raves as the insane Cerruti. Elizabeth Taylor, uncredited, appears in a couple scenes and there are scads of beautiful women, most of them concubines to the evil patriarch, flamboyantly played by John Huston -- at one point, he prances around naked except for tight red underpants. Vilmos Zsigmond shot the film -- as was customary at the time, Zsigmond is given a couple of arias to demonstrate his chops: these scenes are gratuitous but they show what the cameraman can do: one sequence in particular looks like a Western -- Bridges rides a horse through a desert where there is a big lake to reflect his mirror image on the ridges high above the water. The tone is wildly inconsistent and the film veers between cartoonish scenes of violence and static tirades by the villains. Like many films of its era, the movie seems sometimes over-lit and most of the acting is merely serviceable -- it's highly melodramatic and overly emphatic. The film's cynicism is overwhelming -- the young hero has a beautiful girlfriend who seems to be a call-girl living in a uptown mansion like the Dakota. When she vanishes, someone tells him: "She's now entertaining the freshman medical class at Columbia University" and we see her corpse in the next scene on a dissecting table, a sample of the film's acerbic tone. Winter Kills is a very entertaining picture, a cult film but I fear that the members of its cult, conspiracy theorists on the JFK assassination, are dying off and will one day be as extinct as veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. Can you be a "cult film" if your cult no longer exists?
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