Wild Goose Chase

Miles-10

The premise of "Winter Kills" is that, in 1979, the younger brother of an assassinated president is presented with evidence that his brother was not killed by a lone assassin but by a team of them. He begins his own investigation, but, even with the help of his wealthy father, he finds himself running in circles. Every clue seems to lead to a different conspiracy theory, but each clue also leads to a dead end - "dead" often being the operative word, as more than half of the people he interviews are dead soon after he talks to them. Writer-director William Richert seems to have his tongue placed firmly in his cheek throughout this satirical send up of conspiracy theories. It is as if this is a parody of the fevered paranoia of Oliver Stone's "JFK" except that this movie was made a dozen years earlier.

In this fictional universe, President Timothy Kegan was assassinated while his motorcade rode through downtown Philadelphia on February 22, 1960. The similarity to the assassination of John F. Kennedy on a date more than three years later and in a different state of the Union is thinly disguised. So is the dead president's father, unscrupulous tycoon Thomas Kegan (John Huston), more or less a ringer for Joseph Kennedy. (Both pulled strings to get their sons elected to office, and even some publicity called the character "Joe Kegan" instead on "Thomas".) And the late president's brother, Nicholas Kegan (Jeff Bridges), is at least remotely similar to Edward M. Kennedy, only less of a libertine and without any political ambitions. (So, not very similar.) In the end, Nick almost resembles Truman Burbank of "The Truman Show" but controlled on the end of a much longer tether.

The cast largely consists of vintage actors from the 1950s and '60s. Even Japanese film icon Toshiro Mifune makes a cameo appearance in a rare English-language role. Unfortunately, these cameos are too numerous for many of them to amount to anything. Anthony Perkins, for example, is seen briefly at the beginning, but is not brought back until near the end for a performance that makes an insane semblance of tying the plot together.

On seeing "Winter Kills" a second time, I was amused to see how Richert toys with us just as Nick is being toyed with. The solution is in plain sight the whole time, if only we could look beyond the window dressing and face the seemingly unthinkable.

The dialogue contains many priceless parodies of conspiracy logic, such as an early line by Richard Boone.

Keifitz (Boone): You were just a little boy when President Kegan was gunned down in Philadelphia, but, in the subsequent 19 years, more than 16 people who seemingly had nothing to do with that awful event have died under mysterious conditions.

Lines like this hit a discordant note as the character avoids the more hackneyed yet almost comforting cliché "mysterious circumstances."

Funnier and at the same time even more evocative for the baby-boomer audience that originally saw this film when it was released, is the dialogue in the scene where Nick and a bumbling police captain named Heller visit one of the assassin's perches. Heller insists on interrogating the current proprietor at the location as if he could possibly have been at the crime scene nearly two decades before.

Captain Heller (Brad Dexter): Where were you on February 22, 1960?
John Kullers (Kyle Morris): Nineteen-sixty? What is this?
Captain Heller: You don't remember the date President Kegan was shot?
John Kullers: Long Island... in school... Mrs. Sayer's eighth grade English class.
Captain Heller (skeptically): Oh, yeah?

This movie might as well have been entitled "Wild Goose Chase", not that Nick and the audience don't find out what happened in the end. It is just that there is nothing that Nick can do about it and nothing we can take away from this entertainment except a lesson in the value of healthy skepticism about the agendas of those feeding us information.

score 8/10

Miles-10 3 March 2019

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4696930/