Why ‘Winter Kills’ Is the Perfect Conspiracy Thriller for the QAnon Era

The ’70s were the perfect time to be paranoid: rumors of government-sanctioned assassinations here and abroad, second-gunman theories around dead presidents, whispers of elite secret societies pulling strings, that whole Watergate thing. It wafted in the air like yesterday’s tear gas. The movies picked up the vibe and amplified it. Buy a ticket and you could see Warren Beatty discover an assassin-recruitment corporation (The Parallax View), Robert Redford as a CIA analyst on the run from agency goons (Three Days of the Condor), Gene Hackman get tripped up over his own surveillance-state expertise (The Conversation), Burt Lancaster lead a cabal of industrialist fatcats in a plot to kill JFK (Executive Action), and movie stars play real reporters taking down a real POTUS (All the President’s Men). You didn’t have to be Richard Hofstadter to pick up what this popular genre was putting down.

What’s arguably the wildest conspiracy thriller of the Me Decade, however, dropped right at the very tail end of it. Winter Kills takes the what-if scenario from Richard Condon’s 1974 novel — what if a Kennedy-like commander-in-chief had been killed by not one gunman, not two gunmen, but a plan involving a half dozen different parties — and pumps it full of nitrous oxide. Years before one Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski would be privy to all the new shit that’s come to light, man, Jeff Bridges’ half-brother to a murdered president would find himself in the middle of a cover-up involving the mob, a movie studio, military fetishists, fake models, and the world’s most corrupt paterfamilias. Red herrings, rabbit holes and oddball detours lurk around every corner. It’s a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference. Even by 1979 standards, it’s a seriously warped film. Writer-director William Richert once called it “cinematic cocaine: relentless, just getting higher and stranger, shooting through contemporary paranoia.”

The fact that Rialto Pictures and superfan Quentin Tarantino are bringing Winter Kills back for a theatrical run, complete with newly struck 35mm prints, at this particular moment in time is possibly the least weird thing about the movie and its storied history. (More on that second part in a moment.) Of all the 1970s conspiracy thrillers, this one somehow feels the most attuned to our modern era of batshit Reddit threads and lone pundits buzzed off their own chemtrail theories. Chilling on a ship off the coast of Malaysia, Bridges’ rich kid Nick Kegan (a Kennedy by any other name) gets a visit from one of his dad’s lackeys. It seems that someone has confessed to being “the second rifle at City Hall” when his half-brother was shot in the early ’60s. The alleged assassin dies, but not before he tells Kegan to go to a building in Philadelphia and check out the steampipe in Room 903.

They hightail it to the City of Brotherly Love and sure enough, there’s the gun, wrapped in plastic and hidden right where the mysterious stranger said it would be. Kegan, accompanied by an old friend and several police officers, confiscate the weapon. When they pile in the car to take the item back to the station for further investigation, he happens to notice a young woman and a child riding around the square on a bicycle. He stares at her. She pops her bubblegum. When Nick turns back around, everyone else in the car has been shot through the head. A few minutes later, he discovers the rifle is now missing as well.

That scene is an early indication that you’re in good hands, in terms of channeling dread over unseen forces doing dirty deeds for shadowy patrons. It’s also where the narrative begins to spin out of control with a velocity that will throw most moviegoers into a state of confusion and delirium. Condon had written The Manchurian Candidate back in 1959, which demonstrated that he was a novelist who could weave a satire into a political thriller, and vice versa. By the time he wrote Winter Kills, the Warren Commission had introduced more questions than answers in regards to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and there were unaffiliated networks of hyperventilating “truth” tellers with whiteboards full of thoughts on who, how, and why. The author tried to synthesize all of those ideas into one fit-to-burst story; when Richert attempted to simplify it into a script for a two-hour feature, he only seemed to complicate matters more. His movie makes even less sense than the book — which somehow makes it an even better translation of what Condon was on about.

And Winter Kills fills out its large cast of characters with an ensemble that suggests the greatest Hollywood Squares episode never made. Anthony Perkins gives the second creepiest performance of his career as an accountant-slash-data overlord. John Huston turns his Joe Kennedy-like titan of industry into a monster that makes Chinatown‘s Noah Cross look cuddly. Australian model Belinda Bauer plays [checks notes] an Australian model-journalist… or is she? Fifties starlet Dorothy Malone mixes with Have Gun Will Travel‘s Richard Boone, Kiss Me Deadly‘s Ralph Meeker, and Eli Wallach (as a Jack Ruby type named Joe Diamond). Sterling Hayden, Toshiro Mifune, and spaghetti-Western royalty Tomas Milan drop by, just for tough-guy kicks. She’s not credited, but yes, that’s Elizabeth Taylor as a character described by Richert as “a pimp for the mob.” Her only line is a barely mouthed profanity.

It ends with character holding on to an American flag draped over the side of skyscraper, before ripping it in half and plummeting to his death, yelling out stock tips as he falls. What you lose in subtlety, you gain in giddy, over-the-top symbolism. Before Richert could gift us with that magnificent climax, however, he’d have to navigate his own labyrinth of setbacks and curious circumstances. As related in a Harper’s article written by Condon in 1982 and a DVD documentary titled Who Killed ‘Winter Kills?’, the movie’s producers had some extraordinary ways of getting funds and cutting ethical corners; one of them would end up murdered. The production was shut down two weeks before completion due to union issues and lack of funds. Richert and Bridges had to shoot another movie in Germany, The American Success Company, in order to make enough money to finish their previous project.

When Winter Kills finally did get released, critics raved about it — and then the film was mysteriously pulled from theaters. In the doc, Richert quotes Condon’s notion that its disappearance had to do with how film company Avco Embassy had business dealings with the Kennedys, and as Ted Kennedy was preparing a possible presidential campaign, “they didn’t want that movie around. And then it wasn’t around.” It’s one possible conspiracy theory among several, to be sure, but just because you’re paranoid…

In the intervening years, the movie’s reputation as a cult classic grew and grew, and this re-release, along with Tarantino’s seal of cinegeek approval, will undoubtedly double that cult’s size. When you watch a lot of ’70s conspiracy thrillers, especially ones that dabble in JFK ephemera, there’s a lovely time-machine sensation of revisiting the worries, fears, and furrowed-brow anxieties of a bygone, wide-lapeled age. See Winter Kills today, and the comfort of a “that was then” feeling is supplanted by the contemporary dread of now. You’re only a few clicks away from folks railing about pedophile rings run out of pizza shop basements, deep-state maneuvering, false-flag operations, and other wackadoo notions. The fact that they sit side by side with actual reports of the rich and powerful playing puppetmaster with our political process only makes you sweat more. The totally batshit theories that Winter Kills toys with used to be confined safely on the fringe or within the theater’s walls. Now they’re running through the veins of our national bloodstream.