Winter Kills

Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins
This little-seen 1979 film is an adaptation of a novel by The Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon. It plunges into the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories that surround it. Winter Kills provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favourably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone's JFK and James Ellroy's book American Tabloid. Financed by soft-porn distributors with a sideline in the drug trade, the production continually ran out of money, at one point forcing Richert to make another movie, The American Success Company, in order to raise funds for its completion. Though Winter Kills met with glowing reviews, it received a limited release in only a few cities, prompting Condon to write an article blaming the Kennedys and the military-industrial complex. Perkins' character's possible involvement went without comment.