winter kills: overlooked classic, my lily-white ass

*SPOILER ALERT: LOTS OF BIG, BIG SPOILERS HERE*

They say it was shunned as unclean by the studios, and only got shot when wealthy marijuana tycoons stepped up, paying expenses in cash. They say those who worked on it remember it with a certain fondness. Its proponents claim that it was buried at the box office because America wasn't ready for so cynical a view of our beloved Kennedys at that early juncture. My own distant memory is of reviews lauding its daring in taking on the Kennedy mystique. Young and uncynical and festooned with high hopes, I sprinted to the cinema to see it, only to emerge both hangdog and disgruntled. Some things, though, you just don't get when you're a kid, like broccoli, and cigarettes, and why there was no possible way that Shane could stick around the Starrett Ranch.

Bearing all this in mind, I watched it again last night, and I’m here to tell you that adulthood just makes it worse.

It’s one big circular muddle. Nothing makes sense, and it goes round and round with one nonsensical thing NOT leading to the next. It can’t decide whether it wants to be a dark, muddly comedy or an angsty, existential drama (aka Parallax View, which is certainly what I wanted it to be), and it goes bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite crossing either line fully, or, anyway, successfully. The body count is incredibly high (or so we’re told, but is it true? No narrator is reliable in this shifty, trickster power-play world) but at the end you’re still not sure who, if anyone, is pulling the strings. And how does John Huston wind up falling off the balcony? Is that a suicide? And if so, why for the love of mike would such a man do such a thing? And can you still call a thing a conspiracy if everyone on God’s green earth is part of it? And who the sam hill is the gum-chewing lady in the red coat on the slow-motion bicycle with the little kid who seems to be either an angel of mercy or a harbinger of doom?

These questions and more go unanswered in this unenjoyably illusion-webbed conspiracy-theory plot which makes no sense and goes nowhere not particularly fast. It’s not funny, and not gripping. The plot-turns are random and unsatisfying. Our hero (Jeff Bridges) is the black-sheep, non-political brother of a young, charismatic president who was assassinated in a motorcade in the ‘60s. He lives an absurdly coddled, ultra-wealthy lifestyle and yet has somehow remained ridiculously innocent well into his twenties despite growing up in a sort of harem in which both satyr-like father and satyr-like brother vied for the most extensive collection of venereal diseases. John Huston, the family patriarch, is a powerhouse wearing the Joseph Kennedy shoes, Anthony Perkins is his spidery master of arcane information. You get cameos by the likes of Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Brad Dexter, Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Boone, but you frankly don’t get much more than that. Certainly you get no new insight into the Kennedy assassination or even into the Weltanschauung which might have made it possible. Once you get to the end and realize that EVERYONE is playing on THE SAME EVIL TEAM, the fact that the whole thing got instigated in the first place becomes the real puzzle (WHY did Richard Boone bring the dying confession of a second gunman to the younger brother? What did he hope to accomplish?).

Now I ponder it, it puts me in mind me of Anonymous. As history, the Emmerich bard-drubbing is patently and unabashedly bughouse-nuts, but its very brashness (plus its access to top-notch actors) makes it attractive to the uninitiated. Winter Kills, in heading way over the top in its Kennedy-bashing, was the '70s equivalent of spray-painting a moustache on a holy statue while trying to hide behind a veneer of high-brow satire.

The thing is, it’s all a mess. It’s got some fun (Anthony Perkins has a gnomishly mischievous scene in which he plays with our naive hero’s mind), it’s got some good actors, it’s got some very dated costumes (did yuppies really ever wear the sweater draped over the shoulders as they do in movies back then? It looks so fakey, like the massive shoulder-pads that would infect women’s fashions in ‘80s TV shows) and some soft-focus for the aging starlets, it’s got enough reference to the Kennedys to pique the curiosity but not enough to make any sense. It’s got attempts at M*A*S*H / Catch-22 type anarchic humour without coming close to pulling any of it off.

What’s it missing? that elusive thing, mise-en-scene, for a start. (“What is Mise-en-scene? It is what an Auteur has. What designates an Auteur? He is a director who has Mise-en-scene.”) In something like the Parallax View, even though things remain obscured to us, there is such a firmness of vision on the parts of director and writer that one feels helpless at the end, almost devastated by the cold distance its gods keep from its world. Winter Kills, on the other hand, is like one of those observe-our-weirdness! TV adventure-dramas where one bizarre thing happens after another until at some point the hair goes up on the back of your neck as you realize that THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY’RE GOING WITH THIS. THIS IS ALL JUST PADDING, ALL SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.