What a Cast

I like to post on "Psycho" and I like to post on Richard Boone -- and they have absolutely nothing in common. But whaddya know, here's a movie that has Anthony Perkins and Richard Boone in the cast, each being true to their famous personas.

But wait, there's more. "Winter Kills" is from a novel by Richard Condon, who wrote the novel that became the very great movie "The Manchurian Candidate."

But wait, there's more:

You got two guys from "The Magnificent Seven" in this movie (Eli Wallach, the villain of that film, and Brad Dexter, one of the actual Seven.)

And you've got the Japanese star of the ORIGINAL "Magnificent Seven" (Kurosawa's "Seven Samarai"), Toshiro Mifune.

You've got the best of the Mickey Spillanes -- Ralph Meeker, from Robert Aldrich's classic "Kiss Me Deadly," a bit more grizzled and thick around the middle now.

You've got the sexiest of fifties tramps-- Dorothy Malone, from "Written on the Wind," a bit older and wiser now.

You've got B-movie idol Sterling Hayden, who has everything from "The Asphalt Jungle" to "Johnny Guitar" to "Dr. Strangelove" to "The Godfather" on his resume, (and who was almost cast as Quint in "Jaws.")

Folks, you've even got Elizabeth Taylor, doing a silent cameo with a nasty word mouthed.

And leading the whole thing, you've got the always-amiable and quirky Jeff Bridges (back when he was a young, fit fellah) and the imposingly croak-voiced horned toad John Huston (only a few years after his villainous turn in "Chinatown.")

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Came the seventies, frankly, a whole host of notable actors from the decades before didn't necessarily have what it took to single-handedly carry a movie any more. If you were Tony Perkins or Richard Boone, the thing to do was to make a two or three scene "cameo," in which your instantly recognizable face, voice and persona made the audience excited just to see you, for however short a period. Ralph Meeker and Dorothy Malone were more of an "in-depth speciality" in star personas -- you really had to know your guilty pleasures to recognize them. Sterling Hayden SHOULD have been that way (a 50's guilty-pleasure guy), but "Dr. Strangelove" and "The Godfather" had given Hayden plenty of cred with the younger generation.

I haven't mentioned if "Winter Kills" is good or not. It's good enough -- but I'm not so sure it matters with all that star-gazing you get to do here.

Imdb gives a fairly good history of "Winter Kills," a movie that still confuses me as to its origins and collapse. It seems that the movie was started, dropped, and re-started, with certain scenes falling out along the way, and then patched together for a very brief theaterical release.

The movie that resulted is easy enough to follow -- very big on analogies to the JFK assassination and the Gordian knot of Mafioso, Cubans, CIA and military types who've always been associated with it -- and rather too blunt and heavy-handed. Scenes just sort of come crashing in out of nowhere,and the climax seems rushed. "The Manchurian Candidate" this is definitely not. Odd, though: "The Manchurian Candidate" may have influenced Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK. This movie posits (fictionally) who REALLY did it.

Tony Perkins actually plays a very important character -- a nutty spymaster who runs the computers that watch everybody in the world, or something -- and he plays it in the robotic sing-song, quirky style that would soon mar all those "Psycho" sequels in the 80's and 1990. Something changed in Tony's acting style by the 70's -- but he was still someone that nobody could match in terms of bizarre mannerisms, odd physique (super-thin with giant shoulders) and mesmerizingly beautiful good looks.

This was Richard Boone's last appearance before he died, save a Japanese production made a year or so later. Boone is old and tired but reliably Richard Boone. One problem: when he points his finger like he always does as the stylish actor he was, it stays pointed and never "un-points." I guess he got too old to curl the finger back up. Good news for Boone fans: whereas usually it takes awhile to get him into a 70's movie cameo (he's very late to "The Shootist" and "The Big Sleep"), here he shows up in the first scene of the movie.

I can't hardly remember the other cameos, save Sterling Hayden's as a military man with an Ahab beard who commands a tank squadron around his U.S. estate. Huston is suitably villainous and arrogant, Noah Cross for the New Age. Bridges is good as always -- this is "the Dude" before he grew his hair out.

One more thing: I don't usually mention these things, but there is one hell of a beautiful actress in this named Belinda Bauer, who does a nude sex scene with Bridges which is flat out-hilarious (she screams like a banshee during the act, so he puts a "friendly" pillow over her mouth), and certainly pleasant to watch.