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Winter Kills

Nineteen years after a president is shot in an open car, his younger brother is handed a dying man’s confession and a second rifle — and the family empire would rather he dropped it. William Richert’s 1979 black-comic thriller, adapted from Richard Condon’s novel and Richert’s first fiction feature, is a barely veiled riff on the Kennedy assassination: the Kegans stand in for that dynasty, the Pickering Commission for Warren, and John Huston’s Pa Kegan is a Joseph Kennedy figure who owns the country and the truth. Jeff Bridges plays Nick, the half-brother stumbling through billionaires, intelligence men, and dead witnesses; Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Toshiro Mifune, and a blink-and-miss Elizabeth Taylor fill the maze. Vilmos Zsigmond shoots the paranoia; Maurice Jarre scores it. Pulled from theaters, rescued as a cult object, it is the assassination thriller as American farce.

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