Winter Kills

(William Richert, USA, 1979)

A young man, Nick (Jeff Bridges), hears – on a boat in the middle of nowhere – the dying confession of a nobody: it was he who assassinated Nick’s brother, the President of the USA, 19 years earlier!

Going to the spot the confessor described, Nick finds the murder weapon, eerily left exactly as indicated. Holding this evidence, Nick gets into a car with three cops. Momentarily distracted by the sight of a woman on a bicycle, child in tow and blowing gum, Nick turns back to discover that the cops have been efficiently and silently murdered.

Winter Kills is, we may say, freaky. A conspiracy-theory, paranoiac nightmare in the tradition of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Executive Action (1973) and The Parallax View (1974), it is based on the events of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the much-disputed Warren Commission that followed it. [2025 update: Oliver Stone is still on this investigative trail, 30 years after his JFK [1991] feature, in the TV series JFK: Destiny Betrayed.]

True to the fundamental unfathomability of those events, Winter Kills displays an inexorable, hallucinatory logic. Political treachery eventually invades every bit of sexual and familial intimacy, leaving the beleaguered Nick with no one to trust and no safe place whatsoever.

Writer-director William Richert [1942-2022] made a deep impression on some cinephiles with this narrative feature debut. An extraordinarily diverse cast includes Dorothy Malone, Sterling Hayden and Toshiro Mifune. Particularly blood-curdling are Anthony Perkins as a machinating adviser and John Huston as Nick’s powerful, decadent father (a role he made all his own in the wake of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown [1974]).

Black, despairing, thought provoking, Winter Kills makes for phenomenal viewing.

Richert’s subsequent career was a difficult ride: he managed to acquire the re-cut rights for both this film and The American Success Company (1980, scripted by Larry Cohen). His teen movie A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), with River Phoenix and Ann Magnuson, is a curio worth seeking out – and this, too, exists in an alternative director’s cut titled Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? (the title of Richert’s 1966 source novel).

His only subsequent directorial credit, from the later years spent filing lawsuits against both the Writers and Directors Guilds of America on various matters of credit and payment, was an adaptation of Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask (1998; not to be confused with this version made the same year).

© Adrian Martin 1 June 1990 (+ 2025 update)