A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “Winter Kills,” adapted by the director William Richert from Richard Condon’s 1974 best seller, is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.
The movie, first released in 1979, and then again in 1983 (with its ending supposedly altered), returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print.
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission and established in 1963, was still hotly contested when Condon wrote his novel, a precursor to literary treatments of Kennedy’s death like Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” The movie is redolent of Watergate-era films like “The Parallax View” from 1974, but in the age of QAnon it scarcely seems dated. One of the novel’s favorable reviews quotes Condon to the effect…
