William Richert’s 1979 cult classic is a one-movie film festival of political satire.
Quentin Tarantino is presenting the revival of Winter Kills at New York’s Film Forum because it’s the kind of movie he wishes to make when he grows up. The timing is perfect: Recent prohibitions on free speech — especially conspiracy theories — attack the pursuit of truth that is at the movie’s heart. The late director William Richert adapted Winter Kills from a novel by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate) that entertained the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Richert used that turning point for American culture in the allegory of Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges), the younger brother of an assassinated U.S. president, who searches for the truth behind the killing that rocked a nation and shattered his innocence.
First released in 1979, after legendary financial difficulties made Richert take several years to complete the film, Winter Kills is one of the most dazzling feature debuts since Citizen Kane. Richert, an avuncular, behavioral wit, satirized the personal paranoia that followed the JFK assassination and Watergate through Nick Kegan’s adventures down the rabbit hole of government corruption. Richert reveals a panoply of international intrigue — Cuba, the Mob, the deep state — that required the best resources of the then-changing Hollywood film industry to capture so exuberantly.
Richert hustled a star-studded cast to simultaneously represent Kennedy-era cultural history and its political specter. The actors carry associations that enrich the tale’s significance: Bridges’s wounded alienation recalls The Last Picture Show and The Iceman Cometh. John Huston as his enigmatic tycoon father scarily evokes Chinatown. Sterling Hayden recalls Dr. Strangelove. Anthony Perkins beckons The Trial. Toshiro Mifune summons High and Low, The Bad Sleep Well. Richard Boone summons Hombre. Ralph Meeker echoes Kiss Me Deadly. Dorothy Malone evokes The Big Sleep. Eli Wallach convokes The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Tomas Milian echoes spaghetti westerns as well as Visconti. And Elizabeth Taylor’s four-scene cameo (in a role resembling JFK’s Mob-related mistress Judith Exner) brings the legacy of Hollywood to bear on the money-power-espionage-sex mythology.
It’s no wonder political naïf Tarantino loves Winter Kills. It’s a one-movie film festival. Multiple movie references provide a moral through line — just like André Téchiné’s French Provincial and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Richert’s movie intelligence (fully aware of how The Manchurian Candidate, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and The Parallax View parlayed post-assassination cynicism) also evinces his moral consciousness — such as has virtually disappeared from contemporary pop culture.
We were more innocent when Winter Kills came out. Now our politics are so bad that even the Kennedy family has been turned against each other. Richert pushes the absurdism of “conspiracy lovers in this conspiracy-loving country” yet links it to Nick’s abiding trust (as in his attempts to romance a mysterious magazine editor played flirtatiously by Belinda Baur). Nick embodies the ambivalence of Richert’s generation (which includes Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Walter Hill, James Toback). Their rarely addressed filial issues form the movie’s core: Nick’s relationship to his father (challenging Joe Kennedy’s favoritism of JFK) teeters from the political awakening that most ’70s filmmakers found difficult to work through. (Most millennial filmmakers don’t even try.)
This son–father paradigm, perfectly acted by Bridges and Huston (“I’m the Jupiter of thieves!”) distinguishes Winter Kills from all other political satires. Richert resolves a family tiff with a visually stunning digression of Nick escaping his father’s palatial residence, horseback riding across a vast desert landscape that honors Lawrence of Arabia (anticipating Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), climaxing with the ultimate Oedipal tantrum.
Vilmos Zsigmond’s lustrous imagery rivals the avant-garde splendor of Point Blank, aided by Maurice Jarre’s emotionally precise music — buoyant aesthetics triumphing over cynicism. Even the crowning scene of Huston sliding down a gigantic American flag (an iconographic protest reimagined in De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out) symbolizes a patriot/patriarch duality.
The revival of Winter Kills is relevant to the current crisis. When assistant cinematographer John Bailey recently bragged that the film “closely predicts not only the mores of society today but that of a recent tenant of the White House,” he stupidly overlooked a more pertinent crackhead-scumbag analogy — and he’s wrong. (It was Bailey who led the Motion Picture Academy’s diversity makeover.) Richert avoided cheap shots (although his 2010 DVD commentary mentioned parallels to the Bush dynasty). Nick’s search for the truth parallels his search for love, memorably shown in the film’s quiet, unnerving final image.
Our culture may have lost its sense of humor and sense of outrage — meaning, we’ve lost moral confidence — but Winter Kills caps Hollywood’s convention of political paranoia without Richert ever succumbing to nihilism. There is no disillusionment in filmmaking this vibrant.
