Winter Kills (dir. William Richert, 1979)
Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.
In his 1988 novel, Don DeLillo has CIA archivist Nicholas Branch muse on his study of the assassination of John Kennedy and the impossibility of ever truly forming a coherent narrative of the events of November 22, 1963. There’s too much material, too much history to ever have more than a sketch of the known facts. The president was killed, and we hold a man named Lee Harvey Oswald responsible. There are other possibilities, certainly, but this is the official story and one that holds up as a narrative as well as any other. There are discrepancies and shrouded details, sure, but what story doesn’t have them?
Don DeLillo wasn’t the first novelist to take on the Kennedy assassination as a subject. One of the first was by a thriller writer and satirist named Richard Condon. He had made a name for himself with The Manchurian Candidate in 1959, and would plumb similar ground with his 1974 novel Winter Kills, which also concerns the murder of a president. DeLillo had the benefit of an additional decade of research to craft his take on Kennedy and Oswald. Condon went a much different route. Instead of providing a quasi-factual account of killing, he wrote an entirely fictional one. Kennedy became Kegan. Dallas 1963 turned into Philadelphia 1960. The lone gunman went from a man named Oswald to a man named Willie Arnold, whose own assassin was a mobster named Joe Diamond instead of Jack Ruby. By rejecting strict retelling, Condon was able to get to the dark heart of the matter, portraying a crime where the details fail to cohere and alternative narratives abound.
Condon’s novel received an adaptation in 1979 that was seemingly doomed from the start. Written and directed by William Richert and produced by a pair of pot dealers [1], Winter Kills should be commended for merely existing. The film went over budget, and the production had to declare bankruptcy. An entirely different film was made while Winter Kills was shut down merely to raise funds to continue making it. When it was finally released against all these obstacles, it was dismissed by critics and largely ignored by audiences. The film languished for years, though its reputation has grown as more people have seen it and recognized it as something between paranoid fantasia and satirical roman a clef.
Jeff Bridges stars as Nick Kegan, a charming layabout whose half-brother Timothy happened to be the President of the United States until he was gunned down. He’s a disappointment to his father Pa Kegan (John Huston), who is, for legal purposes, not at all a caricature of Joseph Kennedy. While on his family’s ship, a man wrapped in bandages and claiming to be Arthur Fletcher. He says that he was the man that really shot the president on the behest of someone named Casper, Jr. A trip to Philadelphia yields evidence in a hidden rifle, but the men Nick is with are killed and the rifle vanishes. Having seemingly no choice but to dig deeper into the mystery, Nick has a harrowing tour of America’s underbelly and its eccentric and dangerous denizens as played by an all-star cast featuring Sterling Hayden, Toshiro Mifune, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Anthony Perkins, and no less a star than Elizabeth Taylor [2].
Richert felt that the only way to tell the story of Winter Kills was as a comedy. He thought that the story told in the novel was too dark, too distressing even at the late date of 1979 for audiences to tolerate. While the film is quite funny in parts and in some ways is a prototype for Jeff Bridges’s future work in The Big Lebowski, but, on the whole, it remains a horrifying story about a man who cannot and possibly never will find closure in his brother’s murder. This is mirrored in the real world. Even if you accept the established history of Kennedy’s death [3], there’s no denying how unsatisfying it is. Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald prevented a trial from happening, which in its way only created more conspiratorial theorizing.
Oliver Stone would achieve what most people consider the ultimate film about the Kennedy assasination with JFK, and it certainly is an achievement even if it’s a mostly dubious document of history. Winter Kills, though? It has no intentions to be a record of facts and lies. No one opened up any government records because of its release. It did, however, depict the surreality of that event in a way that Stone could not, and that is perhaps what contributed to its failure at the box office and with the critical establishment at the time of its release. Winter Kills made a dark joke of the assassination, while remaining a serious and honest assessment of the national psyche. It put up a mirror to America, and America rejected it wholesale in favor of blockbuster entertainment and crowdpleasers. Something like Winter Kills would have to become a cult object before anyone could truly engage with its portrait of a country on the brink of madness.
[1] One went to prison for decades, the other was murdered by an unknown party in the midst of the film’s production.
[2] Perhaps this is why it was such an expensive shoot. Oh well.
[3] For the record, I do not know and am uncertain that it actually matters. The results are the same regardless if Kennedy’s assassination was an organized conspiracy or if a number of highly placed opportunist used his death as a convenient cover to enact their own agendas. I do suspect that various federal, state, and local agencies concealed certain unflattering details, such as how they seemingly lost track of a man who defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the US.
oliveresque 