When director William Richert first walked onto the set of his film Winter Kills, he wasn’t sure how a 35mm camera worked because he had never seen one up close. He was almost a complete novice, untested except for a few short documentaries, but he somehow managed to assemble a rather extraordinary cast a crew. The supporting roles went to actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Toshiro Mifune and Anthony Perkins, with Jeff Daniels and John Huston as the leads. For cinematography Richert had the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who had just won an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and for production design he had the equally great Robert F. Boyle, a personal favorite of Alfred Hitchcock.
Working from his own script, a comic adaptation of the novel by James Condon, Richert intended to make Winter Kills into a sort of conspiracy theory Alice in Wonderland, the Kennedy Assassination seen through the rabbit hole. Daniels plays the sheltered half-brother of a president who was gunned down nineteen years ago and when clues about the murder begin to come to light, he is drawn into a bizarre world of conspiracies and paranoia where clues lead back on each other like a Gordian knot.
Winter Kills is deliberately confusing and often just plain weird, but it the tone is somewhere between satirical slapstick and bleak absurdity. It often feels like a half-decent shot at making Coen Brothers movie, although it predates the Coens’ first film by half a decade. Come to think, it might make a decent double bill with The Big Lebowski, another offbeat piece of Americana with Jeff Daniels haplessly trying to decipher a mystery. Daniels turns in a solid performance in Winter Kills, but it’s John Huston as the cheerfully corrupt Joe Kennedy-type patriarch who really steals the show. His character is an unrepentant crook of the worst kind, but Huston plays him with such exuberance that he almost becomes lovable, though always detestable.
The film is very funny and imaginative, but it stumbles in places and frequently feels flat and uneven. Perhaps this is Richert’s inexperience as a director showing, although the production problems faced by the film are also a likely culprit.
Financed by a couple of gangsters who had gotten tired of producing soft-core porn movies and were ready for the big time (which explains some of the movie’s gratuitous nudity), Winter Kills was probably on shaky ground from the beginning. There are reports of people being paid in cash by dubious means, and then eventually they stopped being paid at all. The union closed down production on the film at least twice, one producer was executed gangland style and another ended up behind bars. Amazingly, there was a two–year gap in filming, during which Richert gathered up the available Winter Kills cast and crew and made another film in Germany called The American Success Company that somehow made enough money for Richert to finish Winter Kills.
Considering the circumstances, it’s a miracle that the film was made at all. But despite good reviews, Winter Kills was pulled from theaters after just two weeks in release, and it virtually disappeared after that. It was never screened on television and has had a spotty history on home video and DVD. It could be that audiences in 1979 simply didn’t respond to this peculiar little film. Or perhaps, as Condon has suggested, it was pulled from release because the distributor had ties with the Kennedy dynasty, who demanded that they bury the movie.
Who know? In the film, conspiracies only fall away to hide further conspiracies, so perhaps this is a case of life imitating art … or is it the other way around.
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