But years before any of the above examples, Winter Kills <\/em>(1979) got there first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the killings of both JFK and RFK (as well as MLK, Malcolm X, and various other political figures) proved extremely influential on the American cinema of the New Hollywood era, as evident by the spate of conspiracy thrillers that came out during the 70s, Winter Kills<\/em> dealt with the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy more directly than any movie up to that point. It\u2019s true that the names and some of the details are altered\u2014President Kennedy becomes President Keegan, Jack Ruby becomes Joe Diamond, Dallas is swapped out for Philadelphia\u2014but these aren\u2019t meant to fool anyone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The directorial debut of screenwriter William Richert, adapted from the 1974 novel of the same name by Richard Condon\u2014whose most famous book, The Manchurian Candidate<\/em> (1959), would eerily anticipate the events of November 22, 1963\u2014Winter Kills<\/em> stars a young Jeff Bridges (who, between his starring turns in this, Cutter\u2019s Way, The Big Lebowski, Arlington Road,<\/em> and his recent TV miniseries The Old Man<\/em>, might just be the <\/em>leading man of American Conspiracy cinema) as Nick Kegan, the younger brother of the slain president who, 19 years after his brother\u2019s execution, discovers indisputable evidence of a conspiracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Under orders from his powerful, hedonistic industrialist father, Pa Kegan (a show-stealing John Huston, basically playing a funnier and more gleefully perverse version of his Chinatown<\/em> villain), Nick conducts his own investigation and soon finds himself in an upside down America\u2014or is it the real America after all?\u2014run not by our elected officials, but an infinite network of disparate, but equally powerful forces: private intelligence agencies, multinational corporations, the Mafia, dirty Feds and city police, Cuban exiles, Commie double agents,Hollywood bigwigs, and any number of small time hustlers, flesh peddlers, and bagmen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the short making-of documentary Who Killed Winter Kills?<\/em><\/a>, Richert explains how he sought to make a \u201cpolitical Alice in Wonderland<\/em>,\u201d a quest for truth in which a naive innocent has his blinders peeled off after he falls down the rabbit hole and discovers that there\u2019s no such thing, that it\u2019s all just\u2014as one character puts it, cribbing a line from Winston Churchill that Stone would later re-crib for JFK<\/em>\u2014\u201ca riddle inside a riddle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Winter Kills<\/em> shares the kind of byzantine, at times incomprehensible plot you find in the novels of Raymond Chandler and Thomas Pynchon\u2014indeed, it feels spiritually of a piece with the shaggy dog adaptations of their respective novels, The Long Goodbye<\/em><\/a> and Inherent<\/em> Vice<\/em>\u2014and the existential dread of Kafka (one has to imagine that Richert cast Anthony Perkins as the movie\u2019s all-seeing technological mage as an homage to his starring role in Orson Welles\u2019s film of The Trial<\/em>). In adapting Condon\u2019s story, Richert chose to heighten the humor, and at times, the film feels like a broad satire. But at other times Richert plays things deadly serious, his film containing scenes that are as unsettling and nerve-wracking as those found in the moody masterpieces of Alan J. Pakula (The Parallax View<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>All the President\u2019s Men<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n So too does the loyalty of his cast and crew, who followed him through what turned out to be an historically troubled production. Financed by Sterling Gold\u2014the production company of Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg, two marijuana importers who moved into movies by way of the popular softcore Emmanuel <\/em>films before attempting to go legit with this picture\u2014the film ran out of money 11 weeks into shooting. So committed to the project was the key crew that they voluntarily went without pay until the IATSE union shut them down (literally turning the lights out during shooting).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sterling and Goldberg were able to raise a little more money by borrowing from the mob, although they ran out again within a few more weeks and were once more halted by the IATSE. According to model-turned-actress Belinda Bauer, who plays Bridges’ suspicious love interest Yvette, Winter Kills <\/em>was the first film production to ever file to bankruptcy. Things somehow got worse from there when Goldberg was shot to death over these unpaid debts. A couple of years later, Sterling would be convicted of pot smuggling and sentenced to an unprecedented 40 years in prison. (The story of Sterling Gold is long overdue for its own deep dive doc, wouldn\u2019t you say?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film seemed all but dead when Richert hatched an improbable plan: he and Bridges would travel to Germany, where they would shoot a whole other movie, The American Success Story<\/em>\u2014an original dramedy written by the legendary Larry Cohen\u2014and use the profits to finance the completion of Winter Kills<\/em>. Against all odds, this somehow worked, and two years after production halted, Richert was able to reassemble his team (minus Zigmond, who had moved on to another project, but who gave his blessing for his personal operator, John Bailey, to replace him) and complete what by this point had become a passion project for all involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, that passion did not lead to success at the box office. Despite receiving mostly positive reviews from critics\u2014although those who didn\u2019t like the film hated<\/em> it, with Gene Siskel claiming that it \u201crape[d] the memory of President John F. Kennedy\u201d\u2014 distributor AVCO Embassy pulled it from theaters after only a few days. Some have wondered whether this was a case of real-world conspiracy: in his Harper\u2019s<\/em> article <\/a>\u201cWho Killed Winter Kills<\/em>?\u201d, Condon floats a theory that AVCO suppressed its own film in order to appease Senator Ted Kennedy who, about to run for President, would have say over defense contracts the company was involved in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That the story of Winter Kills\u2019s <\/em>making and release proved as shady, convoluted, and ultimately as tragic as the story within it feels like some kind of grand cosmic joke. The film would go on to achieve a small cult following on VHS, with more people finding their way to it following an Anchor Bay DVD release in 2003, as well as in recent years thanks to its availability on streaming platforms. Unfortunately, said streaming transfer is rather shoddy, making it impossible to fully appreciate Zigmond and Bailey\u2019s typically brilliant cinematography or Robert F. Boyle\u2019s incredible production design (the scenes that take place inside Perkin\u2019s sinister information silo are particularly jaw-dropping).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thankfully, this wrong is soon to be righted, as Rialto Pictures and Studio Canal have teamed up with Quentin Tarantino to strike a new print of Winter Kills<\/em>, releasing it in rep houses throughout this summer (a new physical release can\u2019t be far behind). The sheer star power of the film\u2019s pedigree, combined with the cachet of Tarantino\u2019s name\u2014the new print literally reads, \u201cQuentin Tarantino Presents: Winter Kills<\/em>\u201d\u2014all but guarantees it will find a new audience, and it’s only too bad that Richert, who passed away in July of 2022, isn\u2019t around to see it. Winter Kills <\/em>is sure to find purchase amongst new viewers, for whom it will no longer play as some heightened, confusing work of alternative history, but something far closer to the truth\u2014if such a thing even exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Winter Kills” is screening at New York’s Film Forum starting Friday and at Los Angeles’s New Beverly Cinema starting August 25th. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/winter-kills2-scaled-1024x576.jpg\")
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This intentional tonal discombobulation is heightened by the cast that Richert managed to assemble, a double-take inducing murderers\u2019 row of instantly recognizable stars and character actors: Elizabeth Taylor, Tishiro Mifune, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Dorothy Malone, the aforementioned Huston and Perkins. Most of these actors were well past their prime, but Richert\u2019s ability to get so many icons together for so strange and controversial a project speaks to his drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n