http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080139/
Plot:19 years after President Timothy Keegan was assassinated, his brother Nick discovers a dying man claiming to have been the gunman
Specifications:'Winter Kills,' a Serio-Comedy:Spring Fever Time
"WINTER Kills," which opens today at Cinema 2 and a number of other theaters, has been advertised with the slogan "Something funny is happening in 'Winter Kills.' Take it seriously!" You don't see desperation like this every day, nor do you happen upon movies this likable, this ridiculous, or this impossible to describe. "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. That's why other ads for the film have been comparing it to "Dr. Strange-love" and "M*A*S*H." They don't do the trick, either.
This isn't a social satire—it's more like a movie with spring fever. It doesn't make a bit of sense, but it's fast and handsome and entertaining, bursting with a crazy vitality all its own. Sitting back and watching it doesn't seem the proper response, somehow. Chasing it with a butterfly net might be closer to the mark.
The idea—hold onto your hat, please — is that Jeff Bridges is the half-brother of a young President who was assassinated 19 years ago, and that their father, played by John Huston, is the richest, most powerful, and most merrily depraved man in America. Suddenly, new evidence about an extra marksman, a previously unknown assassin, falls into the half-brother's hands. He decides to conduct his own investigation. The first stop is a wig factory.
He meets mobsters. He wonders about the Central Intelligence Agency. He follows the trail of a Jack Ruby type (Eli Wallach) with connections in Cuba. He falls in love with a gorgeous young magazine editor (Belinda Bauer), who is of course not a magazine editor but a gorgeous spy, and who is said to have been a former mistress of his late brother's. She would have been about three years old at the time. However, "Winter Kills" has so many other screws loose that by the time this curious fact comes to light, it's small potatoes.
William Richert, who makes his directorial debut and also adapted the screenplay from Richard Condon's novel, flirts with the notion that the way to hold power in America is to master the art of giving others the runaround. In line with this, Mr. Bridges is indeed run ragged before winding up right back where he started.
This point has been both examined and illustrated more effectively in other American movies — "All the President's Men" and "The Parallax View," both by Alan Pakula, come to mind. But that hardly matters, because Mr. Richert seems to care very little about narrative strength or clarity. Instead, he writes crisp, brittle dialogue that packs a lot of information into clipped sentences and also packs quite a wallop. His direction, equally economical in its way, is riveting even when it concentrates on the irrelevant. One sequence, for instance, has Mr. Bridges leaping onto a horse and galloping to the top of a mountain just so he can shout to the heavens "You stink, Daddy," or words to that effect. But what a mountain! And what a breathless race! And what a memorable moment, even if the thing it does most successfully is to recall "Lawrence of Arabia" (Maurice Jarre wrote the music for both films). That's no minor accomplishment.
In addition to being a shining example of the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, "Winter Kills" is a lavish, globe-trotting movie with a large and distinguished cast. (It has to be a large cast, since people Mr. Bridges meets have a way of being bumped off soon thereafter.) Sterling Hayden plays a zillionaire rancher who chases Mr. Bridges off his territory in a tank. Dorothy Malone is Mr. Bridges's nutty mother, who weeps about the ill health of her little dog and then smothers the creature in his sleep. Anthony Perkins is about as eerie as he's ever been; he and Richard Boone are particularly delightful. Toshiro Mifune has about three lines, not enough to establish whether he's supposed to be Mr. Huston's business associate or valet or houseboy.
Mr. Bridges and Mr. Huston have roles that are just about unplayable, since you have to believe the screenplay's nonsense in its entirety in order to accept their characters at all. Still, Mr. Huston is commendably jolly, and Mr. Bridges is so amiable he can make an audience follow him anywhere, even to the end of the world's woolliest shaggy-dog story. I'm still not exactly sure who did what to whom, but it all has something to do with Elizabeth Taylor. Who makes an uncredited, non-speaking cameo appearance. And mouths only one word, not a very nice one. And plays the President's procuress. And is by no means the most farfetched creature this movie has to offer. Really.
Janet Maslin, NY Times, May 18, 1979
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