The film simplifies the plot of the book somewhat. Nearly twenty years after the assassination of U.S. President Kegan, his half-brother Nick (Bridges) discovers hard evidence there had been a conspiracy behind it.
Plot
Nick Kegan, half-brother to assassinated U.S. President Timothy Kegan, is pulled into an elaborate conspiracy 19 years after the event. Arthur Fletcher, a mysterious man, arrives on Nick's father's oil tanker to reveal that he and another gunman were hired to assassinate President Kegan in 1960. Fletcher claims to have hidden the murder weapon in Philadelphia, then dies before he can give more details.
Nick goes to Philadelphia with two associates and retrieves the rifle; they are ambushed, the two men are killed, and the rifle is stolen. His father, Pa, an exaggerated Joseph P. Kennedy-like figure, is initially dismissive but pivots and pledges to help solve the mystery, "for the family".
Nick meets a series of characters who offer conflicting narratives: Z.K. Dawson, a wealthy rival to his father, implicates a dead police captain and his aide Lt. Roy Doty. Doty confirms corrupt Philadelphia police involvement, and alleges a Mafia connection that funded Kegan's campaig, but which left a $2 million dollar debt to it purportedly unpaid. A Lee Harvey Oswald-like patsy would be set up for the presidential slaying, who’d be eliminated by a sleazy organized crime-connected nightclub owner himself in hock to the Mob.
Irving Mentor, a Mob-connected gangster Nick meets in Cleveland, adds another layer, claiming the assassination was instigated by a Hollywood studio over financial loss due to an affair between the President and a movie starlet who committed suicide. Nick's girlfriend, Yvette, supposedly an employee at vaunted National Magazine, promises to break the story.
Back in New York, Cerruti, the family "information czar", offers new twists on the assassination, and reveals he has dirt enough on anybody who’s anyone to blackmail them. He drops three bombshells on Nick: Yvette was just an actress paid to manipulate him, and is now lying dead in a college dissecting lab. And it was Nick's own father, who had Tim killed, dissatisfied with his son's anti-business policies.
Nick confronts his father at his office in a New York City skyscraper. Pa says he owned the movie studio, paid back the mob, and blames the assassination on a nexus of organized crime, the covert world, and big business. Cerruti has gone power-mad and is blackmailing him. As they argue, Keifetz, a family operative who had brought the dying Fletcher aboard the oil tanker for the deathbed confession, bursts in with orders to kill Nick. In the ensuing gunfight Keifetz and an officer are killed, and Pa seeks to flee Nick's murderous pursuit by going out on a ledge. He falls to his death tearing through a giant American flag while shouting at Nick to relocate the family investments to South America.
Leonard Goldberg and Robert Sterling, drug dealers with very little film experience, optioned the book from Condon for $75,000 plus 5% of proceeds and 10% of home video.[2]:74 Then unknown William Richert convinced the pair of novice producers to let him direct the film after he had adapted Condon's novel. Richert convinced Jeff Bridges to star in the movie by moving on to the road in Malibu where he lived and acting out scenes for him at a local delicatessen.[3]
Filming
Filming began on December 13, 1976.[2]:76 Many of the film's interior scenes were shot in 1977 at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, then home to the American Film Institute's film school.[4] Richert wanted to film Huston's death at the Pan Am Building but claims he was denied permission by an irate employee who threatened that the film would not be allowed within 20 blocks of the building because the "Kennedys have offices here".[2]:80
Sterling and Goldberg had previously worked on releasing the French softcoreEmmanuelle films in the U.S.[5]Winter Kills was under-capitalized. Needing a budget of $6 million, Sterling and Goldberg only ever raised $2.3 million. Many actors were never paid or only received the 20% of their fee that was held in escrow. Elizabeth Taylor insisted on being paid her $100,000 fee up front.[2]:75–6 Some cast and crew reported that they began receiving their pay by being called to a hotel room where they were given envelopes of well-used bills. Eventually, people were working for free until union officials heard of this arrangement. In March 1977, unions shut down the production, forcing it to declare bankruptcy. Goldberg was murdered just before the movie's opening and Sterling was later sentenced to 40 years in prison for marijuana smuggling.[6][5]
Bridges and Bauer went to Germany to work on Richert's next film, The American Success Company. Richert was able to use money from that production to resume work on Winter Kills. On December 18, 1978, production resumed and filming was finished in two weeks. The director explained his devotion to the project by comparing Winter Kills to "cinematic cocaine".[2]:77John Bailey filled in as cinematographer because Vilmos Zsigmond was working on another film. The film's distributor, Embassy Pictures, controlled the final cut.[5]
Reception
The film returned only $1 million on a $6.5 million budget.[7]Embassy Pictures limited preview screenings to a few cities, foregoing the national and international markets. Condon and Richert alleged without support that Avco-Embassy killed it to avoid threatening Avco's federal contracts, which totalled nearly $864 million in 1979.[2]:80 The picture failed to get nationwide distribution, but performed modestly where it was shown.[2]:80 In time it gained a cult following.[8]
Winter Kills received a mixed critical response.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times compared it to M*A*S*H and Dr. Strangelove, writing, "'Winter Kills' isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination".[9] The Times'Vincent Canby also praised the film, complimenting writer/director William Richert's imagination.[10]Brendan Gill of The New Yorker saw the film twice and reported that "I enjoyed it even more the second time, but I cannot pretend that I understood it any better. It is like some intricately embroidered misadventure recounted by a superb, somewhat tipsy storyteller late at night in the library of a big country house, with the cold rain of an enemy night lashing against the windows, and a cozy ruin of red fire red upon the hearth".[11]David Ansen of Newsweek wrote, "In keeping with a morality tale on the excesses of wealth and power, it is extravagantly confusing, grandiosely paranoid, flamboyantly absurd and more than a little fun. Though it utterly lacks the internal consistency that 'good' movies require, as a wild-goose chase it maintains a certain lunatic fascination".[12]
Other contemporary critics were negative,[13] many harshly so. Variety magazine wrote of the film, "If there’s a decent film lurking somewhere in Winter Kills, writer-director William Richert doesn’t want anyone to see it in his Byzantine version of a presidential assassination conspiracy".[14]Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 1 star out of 4 and wrote, "'Winter Kills' rapes the memory of President John F. Kennedy while giving his late father a few dozen kicks in the head, too ... It revels in its every degrading scene. One feels a little less clean just having seen this picture".[15]Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "the kind of conspiratorial caper you like for its continual surprises or hate for its escalating confusions ... It is a Gee Whiz item, expansive, impersonal, never dull".[16] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it an "extravagantly kitschy" film with a "fairly repulsive" story.[17]
Rotten Tomatoes rates it 92% fresh based on 24 reviews with the consensus: "A singularly strange roman à clef rich with paranoia and black humor, Winter Kills views the political skullduggery of the late 20th century with a sharp, jaundiced eye.".[18]
Releases
In the early 1980s, the film was released on VHS in the United States by Embassy Home Entertainment, while in the United Kingdom it was released on VHS by 20th Century Fox Video.[19] In 1983, Richert acquired the rights to the film and re-released a director's cut.[5] The second version included a new ending and additional footage of Elizabeth Taylor.[20][21] In 2023, Quentin Tarantino spearheaded another re-release of Winter Kills featuring a new 35 mm print. John Bailey oversaw the project, which was completed at FotoKem.[22]
Documentary
Who Killed 'Winter Kills'? is a 2003, 38-minute documentary film, directed by Perry Martin and distributed by Anchor Bay, about the production of the film.[23]
↑ Canby, Vincent. "FILM VIEW,"New York Times (MAY 27, 1979).
↑ Gill, Brendan (June 4, 1979). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker. 154.
↑ Ansen, David (June 4, 1979). "On the Trail of the Wild Goose". Newsweek. 76.
↑ Castrillo, Pablo, and Pablo Echart. “Towards a Narrative Definition of the American Political Thriller Film.” Communication & Society, Oct. 2015, p. 118.
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