Winter Kills: A Review

WINTER KILLS

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is Sterling Hayden.

Long before JFK, we got Winter Kills. The difference is that JFK is supposed to be serious, while Winter Kills is supposed to be a comedy. From what I saw, few people seemed to be in on the joke. I find Winter Kills to be a curious film, one that is too close to what it appears to want to spoof to be funny.

Nick Keegan (Jeff Bridges) is the half-brother of the late President of the United States who was assassinated on February 22, 1960. Later I will touch on why I focus on the date of the assassination. It has been nineteen years since Tom Keegan was gunned down in Philadelphia. To his shock, someone has come to his family's ship claiming to have been a second gunman. He confesses to being the true assassin, the official killer being essentially a patsy.

Did I mention that the official assassin was himself killed a few days later while in police custody by a small-time gangster named Joe Diamond (Eli Wallach)? 

As it stands, Nick now starts going on this wild goose chase looking for who is behind the murder. Unfortunately, everyone whom Nick finds somehow ends up dead or is already dead. Nick's father, business and political tycoon Pa Keegan (John Huston) is at first disbelieving, then apparently helpful to Nick's grand investigation. Pa sends him hither and yon, finding all sorts of clues and dead ends. Pa's frenemy Z.K. Dawson (Sterling Hayden) is more irritated that Nick has interrupted his literal war games, threatening to blow him up with his tank. Nick's current on/off mistress Yvette Malone (Belinda Bauer) wants an exclusive for her magazine. She also screams during sex like she's being murdered.

Soon, the investigation into President Tom Keegan's murder involves big business, the Mafia and Hollywood studios. According to Pa's accountant and fixer John Cerutti (Anthony Perkins), it might even involve Pa himself. Nick is not in a good place: Yvette, he discovers, was not only a fake but was murdered herself. It is time for Nick to confront Pa Keegan, leading to more deaths before the day is out.

Winter Kills is clearly based on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film isn't too subtle about this. You don't name the low-level hood hired to kill the alleged Presidential assassin "Joe Diamond" and not expect people to think "Jack Ruby". What I found curious in Winter Kills is that, essentially, it never fully decided if it was going to be a straightforward political thriller or a spoof of Kennedy conspiracy theories.

As a side note, while the Keegan family is meant to be the Kennedys, I don't think Nick Keegan would ever be confused for either Robert or Edward. 

You have some pretty oddball moments in Winter Kills that do play like farce. Sterling Hayden in what essentially is a cameo seems to be spoofing his Dr. Strangelove performance. Barking out his lines, if memory serves right with a cigar in his mouth, Hayden seemed more crazed here than as General Jack D. Ripper. You have an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband, Senator John Warner, also popping up. Why exactly was Toshiro Mifune in this film? Why was he named Keith? He too had pretty much a cameo, and odd ideas of Mifune as the Keegan Japanese houseboy pop up. At least Erin Grey as "Beautiful Woman Three" had a reason for being there.

Maybe they all thought Winter Kills was some kind of lark. The problem is that Jeff Bridges plays it pretty straight. Permanently bamboozled by what is going on, Bridges looks to make Nick someone genuinely attempting to find the truth about his half-brother's killing while everyone else seems to be playing a long joke at his expense. Just before Pa bites the dust in a way that admittedly had me laughing, I half-expected John Huston to look up at his son and yell, "PSYCH!".

You do get the chance to see Bridges constantly shirtless, so I suppose writer/director William Richert made full use of Bridges' appeal. You even had both Bridges and Bauer appear fully nude after their intense sex session. You did not, however, have an explanation why "Yvette Malone" (whom we later find out is really a Jenny O'Brien) had a French accent.

Winter Kills does have good moments, almost all of them due to John Huston. He plays this as a lark, throwing out great lines all over the place. "You abandoned my ship. I got sixty million bucks floating there, and you take off like she's Friday night's hooker," he berates Nick when he comes home. Huston is having a whale of a time camping it up to the Nth degree. Every time he is on screen, you get some rapid-fire delivery of someone not bothering to take any of this seriously. 

One would have hoped that such a thing could have rubbed off on Anthony Perkins as the mysterious Cerutti. In his final scene, he ends up moving in such a way that I thought that he was either crazy or a malfunctioning auto animatronic. It was simultaneously hilarious and bizarre.

As a side note, one of the characters in Winter Kills is named Gameboy Baker (Ralph Meeker). I could think of something else whenever I heard anything about Gameboy.

There are good things in Winter Kills. Maurice Jarre's score is much better than the film. The film does not feel slow. It does, however, seem at war with itself. It could have gone all-in on spoofing conspiracy theories. It could have taken the premise seriously. Instead, Winter Kills seems to want it both ways. I do not know if it works as well as it could have. I do at least understand why Winter Kills is something of a cult film. It's not one that I share but bless them for trying.

I mentioned why I focused on the date of the assassination: February 22, 1960. If we go by the date, I figure that President Keegan was running for reelection as 1960 would be a Presidential election year. It would also be early in the election campaign since the election would have been in November, nine months away. Given that this President Keegan would have been out of office in 1964, it doesn't seem worth the trouble to bump him off at all. I do not know why this detail stuck out to me. However, I am a reviewer that tends to get hung up on specific details, so there it is.

Finally, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  

DECISION: C+