'Winter Kills' Comes to Sag Harbor

Starting on September 15, Sag Harbor Cinema will play Rialto’s rerelease of the 1979 black comedy thriller, “Winter Kills,” which was screenwriter/director William Reichert’s directorial debut. The new 35mm prints, the first struck in over 40 years, were overseen by the film’s camera operator, John Bailey. Bailey went on to be the director of photography on “Cat People,” “The Big Chill” and “Groundhog Day,” as well as the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.

“Winter Kills,” a thinly veiled and hyper-paranoiac take on the JFK assassination, stars Jeff Bridges as Nick Kegan, scion of a fabulously wealthy and powerful family headed by patriarch John Huston (“the real delight of the film” — Canby, The New York Times), as a character based on Joe Kennedy. Bridges soon finds himself going down multiple rabbit holes while trying to unravel the conspiracy behind the murder of a U.S. president, his older brother.

“Winter Kills” features an astonishing supporting cast that seems to parody the 1970s vogue for all-star epics like “Airport” — Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Tomas Milian, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Toshirō Mifune, and a wordless, unbilled appearance by Elizabeth Taylor, who plays a character inspired by JFK’s mobbed-up mistress, Judith Exner.

The story behind “Winter Kills” is as convoluted, mysterious and downright incredulous as the movie itself. The two main producers went bankrupt — one was later sent to a federal prison for drug trafficking, the other tied to his bed by a creditor and shot in the head — and production was suspended for two years while Richert raised the completion money.

Though critically acclaimed on first release — with a rave review by Brendan Gill in The New Yorker and two raves in The New York Times (by both Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin) — “Winter Kills” was dumped by its original distributor, allegedly because of its parent company’s investment in Kennedy family projects. In the early 1980s, Richard Condon, writer of the original novel (along with “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Prizzi’s Honor”), wrote an article for Harper’s called “Who Killed Winter Kills?,” detailing the film’s many behind-the-scenes intrigues.

Wendy Keys, a Sag Harbor Cinema board member and former executive producer of programming for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who was a friend of Richert and championed the film, will introduce the 35mm screening on September 17, at 6 p.m.

Tickets for the screenings of Winter Kills will be available at sagharborcinema.org. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor.