Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

Winter Kills Daddy did it By Will Aitken There may be darker movies around than Winter Kills but you'd be hard pressed to find a dumber one. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond provides the perfect twilit look for this film a@ clef about the Kennedys; this picture plus his work on The Deerhunter puts him sure frontrunner in the Nightfor-Day Shooting Sweeps. With photography this classy it’s a shame director William Richert forgot to bring along the rest of the movie. Richert himself wrote the screenplay from the Richard Condon novel of the same title. Rumor had it that the movie had a hard time getting off the AvcoEmbassy shelf because of its controversial nature, but the first reel alone provides ample evidence that Winter Kills is just a bomb it took the studios two years to figure out how to drop in the quietest way possible. Anyone who's ever gotten hooked on Condon knows his writing can be rhetorical in the most outlandish sense of the word. His maniacally compulsive books drag us screaming delightedly into the darkest realms of the American collective id where everyone wants to do to you the worst you'd ever imagined doing to them, only they do it with twice the panache and half the guilt. Mark Lane explaining the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Jonestown suicides at 78 rpm gives you the very particular Condon geist in a nutshell. But Richert throws away the hard satirical shell and keeps the nut. We get two hours of paranoic yammering underlined with close-ups that take your breath away, if never the script’s. Richert may be onto a whole new style here—talking mouths instead of talking heads. The camera gets in so close we know how the dentist feels at the end of a very long day. What's most peculiar about Winter Kills is that it ever got made at all. It depends on a premise that was shopworn back in late 1963, when all you had to do was go to the nearest Rotary Club luncheon to hear that if Joe Kennedy (Condon calls him Joe Keegan) was rich enough to buy his son the presidency, then he was certainly powerful enough and mean enough to have the cheeky young bastard killed when he started going all liberal, threatening big business and of course his own dad. Perhaps only Rotarians could conceive of JFK as a fiery-eyed trustbuster—although by now audiences are probably ready to believe anything about the Kennedys. We're already so steeped in the guilt of the fathers tradition that the very early moment John Huston makes his swaggering entrance as Pa Keegan (you'd think a veteran movie director would try to cultivate less stage presence), we know Daddy Did It. Corrupt flesh sagging * from his skull, with teeth like he just took a bite out of Chicago and then spat it out again, Huston brings us the vitriol-cured sequel to his absurdly hammy performance as Faye Dunaway’s incestuous daddy in Chinatown. Has Jeff Bridges as Keegan's younger, politically unambitious son ever worked better than opposite Huston? Bridges has always been the cleanest of actors, but in Winter Kills he performs as though he’s done a three-minute scrub before every take. His underplaying is positively surgical and probably has to be since the picture demands his enduring credulousness as a substitute for ours. Bridges keeps on registering unflagging innocence until in the last scenes of the movie his face looks like a four-year-old crayoned it on the back of a paper plate. The question of its paranoid redundance aside, the most intriquing aspect of Winter Kills, for Quebec viewers at least, is how it got a For All rating from the government censors (that’s equivalent to a G in the States). “So kill the cheeky young bastard’ —John Huston raises a lizardly lid. The usual rating system here makes it impossible for you to take the neighborhood 12-year-old to most of the films he most desperately wants to see. The only truly funny scene in the picture comes when the soundtrack cuts abruptly to Bridges’ girlfriend screaming in high agony. Someone must be torturing or even killing her. But then the camera pulls back from blackness to show Bridges atop her. Frantically pumping away to the rhythm of her cries, he shoves a pillow into her face and shouts “Marry me! Marry mel!” with each desperate thrust. Maybe the Quebec censor took Winter Kills as a plea for the nuclear family. Will Aitken is Take One's Associate Editor. He's currently working on a book about Dashiell Hammett and the movies. OVERLOOKED & UNDERRATED And Now the Screaming Starts And Now the Screaming Starts. Director Roy Ward Baker. Forget the silly title. This Gothic amalgam of Jane Eyre, Rosemary's Baby, Straw Dogs and The Hound of the Baskervilles is a superlative horror piece, at least until the highly regrettable closing minute or so, which is the crudest sort of concession to audience superstition. Up till then, Stephanie Beacham screams lustily and gasps copiously as the sorelyput-upon mistress of an old, dark house with a nasty secret, and Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom (second-billed, though he doesn’t appear until the last reel), and Patrick Magee do their standard things with gusto. There’s also a disembodied hand that does more harm than anything of the sort within recent memory. Pierre Greenfield TAKE ONE 13