Winter KillsEveryone makes mistakes. Winter Kills is an unintentional comedy in the flimsy disguise of a political thriller, adapted (one can only imagine how faithfully or otherwise) from the novel of the same name by Richard Condon. (The same Richard Condon who also wrote "The Manchurian Candidate", which was adapted into a far superior film.) Directed by William Richert, Winter Kills is the most confusing and comically bad film I've seen in a long time...and yet its unintentional comedy carries with it an irrepressible weirdness and outright stubbornness to play by the rules of logic and narrative cohesion. Tommy Wiseau, eat your heart out!
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When I first heard about Winter Kills, I believed that it was another "lost classic" from yesteryear; it's been touted as such by the likes of filmmaker and aficionado, Quentin Tarantino. This isn't as rare as you might think; even The Manchurian Candidate was buried for almost two decades. Somehow, this film seems to have endeared itself to many contemporary critics and cinephiles, who expound about its "prophetic message in a post-truth world", as if they were cribbing from prior reviews about Network. Is that what Winter Kills is? Short answer: no, with long answer to follow. A few years after the release of Winter Kills, none other than Condon wrote about its extremely troubled production, and this sheds a lot of light upon what this film really is, which is kind of a hustle. Production began in 1976, a few years before the film's release, and it was produced by a pair of criminals named Leonard Goldberg and Robert Sterling. Their story sounds more interesting than the plot of Winter Kills by a country mile, ending with Sterling sent to jail for forty years for drug smuggling and Goldberg handcuffed and shot in the head in a hotel room--either by a drug deal gone wrong or by the mob (who helped finance Winter Kills), no one can say. Actors barely got paid (some didn't at all), and yet the film boasts a cast that would make most films (of any era) envious. The protagonist is a handsome young man named Jeff Kegan, played by a young and earnest Jeff Bridges. Nick seems to lead a charmed life, but is at odds with his boorish (and repulsively wealthy) father, played by the legendary John Huston, who is seemingly revisiting his performance as Noah Cross from Chinatown in this flick. Their scenes are the bread and butter of the movie, but each one is fundamentally the same. Nick begrudgingly comes to see his father, who makes some combination of offensive and/or depraved comments, doubts him (then believes him) about the conspiracy to kill Nick's brother (once President of the United States) almost twenty years ago; then "Pa" gives Nick a lead, or criticizes his investigation. These are scenes whose only saving grace is from the performance of these talented actors and their delivery of dialogue so bonkers that it boggles the mind. Watching them, I believe that Huston at least was in on the joke, and he hams it up with aplomb. Yet despite this, Winter Kills squanders its copious talent in (frankly) insulting walk-on roles--including one from the great Toshiro Mifune, relegated to the Kegan's butler and Elizabeth Taylor as a...I don't know what she is, but she has a funny hat. Taylor not only isn't even credited in the film, but has her one line completely muted on the audio track! And it doesn't stop there. Consider Anthony Perkins, who has a role so confounding and confusing--as the head of the Kegan empire's surveillance network, housed in a silo, where technicians play ping-pong--that it feels like a joke. (Like the whole movie does.)
I dare not even consider expounding on the plot of Winter Kills at length, because of how intentionally obtuse and even contradictory it is. There are more red herrings here than a fish market, and characters act so implausibly (even Nick) that it's impossible to take any of the story seriously. But was it intentional? I alluded to Tommy Wiseau's The Room earlier, which has gone on to become a midnight movie cult classic and a hallmark of the unintentional comedy; both movies share many qualities in common to a high degree. I suppose that, to some extent, that it comes down to a matter of interpretation, as to whether it was intentional or not. But given the chaotic production and incoherent story, I'm inclined to think that it has survived largely on the basis of its overarching ridiculousness (and some unorthodox film preservation standards). Some examples of the weirdness: Nick only corresponds with a woman one-way via an answering machine. The first time they meet, they have sex, and her screams are unmistakably those of a woman being murdered. He promptly asks her to marry him. And Nick is supposed to the most sane character in the entire film! Another: At one point, Pa retrieves a pistol to give to Nick from a soup tureen, already outfitted with a silencer. He refuses, so Pa retrieves a blackjack from his desk instead, also offering a set of brass knuckles he just happened to have in his suit pocket, but asks that they be returned, because they have "sentimental value". Not crazy enough? Nick comes home to tell his father about a "second gunman" (yep, just like the Kennedy assassination, which this movie rips off in the extreme) who is brought to him while on death's door via helicopter to the large ocean freighter where Nick has been residing (?!). The gunman confesses to killing Nick's brother nineteen years ago, which takes him to a...book repository or something in Philadelphia (not Dallas, mind you), where Nick magically finds the rifle hidden in some pipe after all of five seconds, unmolested for all of this time, and missed by the police, because I guess they're all as incompetent as the one who accompanies him there? And yet, despite all of this, there is an allure to this craziness, a magnetism to this complete idiocy. I compare the strange, even heightened sense of paranoia that defies logic--as paranoia does--to the kinds of expressive and stylized works by the likes of David Lynch or Nicolas Winding Refn. (Given some of the oddball characters, I would be hard pressed to think that this movie didn't leave some impression on Lynch at least.) That's great, but even this is being generous. And yet you'll find a plethora of contemporary critics out there praising Winter Kills from the vantage point of today as being "bold" and so on. Let's be clear. It's perfectly fine to enjoy a bad movie as a guilty pleasure, but going out of your way to hold it up as something that it isn't just lacks integrity. But then again...perhaps even this says something--maybe something cynical, yet trenchant--about the way that people tend to fall in line with popular opinion, and where raising a dissenting thought or asking questions only leads to an avalanche of resistance. But it's not really the movie itself making this observation...it just sets the stage for it. Musings born from gibberish.
Recommended for: Fans of a terribly made political thriller that is nowadays held up as some kind of prophetic testament to the inherent unethical nature of politics by questionable critics. Do I recommend Winter Kills? With a qualified "yes"...qualified because (as mentioned) I enjoyed its bold-faced absurdity and almost contemptuously nonsensical story for what it was, even if it squandered its talent. Guilty pleasures make the world go round, so I suppose that it's worth keeping Winter Kills in your orbit as a result. Could even make for a good entry into the irreverent, audience-participation movie night collective! ("Oh, hi, RiffTrax!")
I dare not even consider expounding on the plot of Winter Kills at length, because of how intentionally obtuse and even contradictory it is. There are more red herrings here than a fish market, and characters act so implausibly (even Nick) that it's impossible to take any of the story seriously. But was it intentional? I alluded to Tommy Wiseau's The Room earlier, which has gone on to become a midnight movie cult classic and a hallmark of the unintentional comedy; both movies share many qualities in common to a high degree. I suppose that, to some extent, that it comes down to a matter of interpretation, as to whether it was intentional or not. But given the chaotic production and incoherent story, I'm inclined to think that it has survived largely on the basis of its overarching ridiculousness (and some unorthodox film preservation standards). Some examples of the weirdness: Nick only corresponds with a woman one-way via an answering machine. The first time they meet, they have sex, and her screams are unmistakably those of a woman being murdered. He promptly asks her to marry him. And Nick is supposed to the most sane character in the entire film! Another: At one point, Pa retrieves a pistol to give to Nick from a soup tureen, already outfitted with a silencer. He refuses, so Pa retrieves a blackjack from his desk instead, also offering a set of brass knuckles he just happened to have in his suit pocket, but asks that they be returned, because they have "sentimental value". Not crazy enough? Nick comes home to tell his father about a "second gunman" (yep, just like the Kennedy assassination, which this movie rips off in the extreme) who is brought to him while on death's door via helicopter to the large ocean freighter where Nick has been residing (?!). The gunman confesses to killing Nick's brother nineteen years ago, which takes him to a...book repository or something in Philadelphia (not Dallas, mind you), where Nick magically finds the rifle hidden in some pipe after all of five seconds, unmolested for all of this time, and missed by the police, because I guess they're all as incompetent as the one who accompanies him there? And yet, despite all of this, there is an allure to this craziness, a magnetism to this complete idiocy. I compare the strange, even heightened sense of paranoia that defies logic--as paranoia does--to the kinds of expressive and stylized works by the likes of David Lynch or Nicolas Winding Refn. (Given some of the oddball characters, I would be hard pressed to think that this movie didn't leave some impression on Lynch at least.) That's great, but even this is being generous. And yet you'll find a plethora of contemporary critics out there praising Winter Kills from the vantage point of today as being "bold" and so on. Let's be clear. It's perfectly fine to enjoy a bad movie as a guilty pleasure, but going out of your way to hold it up as something that it isn't just lacks integrity. But then again...perhaps even this says something--maybe something cynical, yet trenchant--about the way that people tend to fall in line with popular opinion, and where raising a dissenting thought or asking questions only leads to an avalanche of resistance. But it's not really the movie itself making this observation...it just sets the stage for it. Musings born from gibberish.
Recommended for: Fans of a terribly made political thriller that is nowadays held up as some kind of prophetic testament to the inherent unethical nature of politics by questionable critics. Do I recommend Winter Kills? With a qualified "yes"...qualified because (as mentioned) I enjoyed its bold-faced absurdity and almost contemptuously nonsensical story for what it was, even if it squandered its talent. Guilty pleasures make the world go round, so I suppose that it's worth keeping Winter Kills in your orbit as a result. Could even make for a good entry into the irreverent, audience-participation movie night collective! ("Oh, hi, RiffTrax!")