FILM IN REVIEW

1 9 6 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R ‘‘Tucson.’’ That’s all the aging mobster needs to say. The contempt in his voice conveys the weary disgust of every sharpster who’s ever found himself stuck in Hicksville. What can you say about a place where the menu features ‘‘Wild West pastrami’’? We’ve seen this dingy hotel room a hundred times before, and the only way to tell where we are this time is by the Sierra Club sunset outside the window, the bleeding colors having all the reassuring inauthenticity of a backlot backdrop. So here we go again, with the bad guys either setting up a job or hiding out after one. Only this time the players know they’re reaching the end of the line. ‘‘Older, fatter, uglier’’; that’s how Gameboy Baker describes himself, his silk robe and black dress socks making him look less like a slick operator than an old man running to seed in his accustomed, soon-to-be-outmoded style. And Joe Diamond, in his plaid sports jacket and cream fedora? He could be a retiree headed out to a night at the poker tables. They’re not going to be pulling jobs much longer, and this latest one doesn’t even make sense. We might have guessed it would be a hit, but on the president of the United States? The assignment scares Joe so badly that when Gameboy tells him the target he falls 1 9 7 R to his knees – and all Joe’s being asked to do is shoot the shooter. Why me, Joe wonders. Sure, he owes Gameboy, who set him up in his club. And sure, he stole from Manny and Sal and Uncle Louie, but he always intended to pay them back. The pastrami and celery tonic sitting in his stomach is bad enough, but screw the pastrami. This is setting o√ a worse fire in his guts. The president? Are they crazy? And why does Gameboy talk as if it’s just another job, as if the president were another chiseler destined to wind up in a landfill or in the trunk of a stolen car? This isn’t how business is supposed to proceed. But then, Winter Kills isn’t how a movie was supposed to proceed , either. In the late 1970s you didn’t go out to see Ralph Meeker (as Gameboy Baker) or Eli Wallach (as Joe Diamond) playing the kind of scene familiar from endless late nights slumped in front of the TV flicking the remote. And you sure as hell didn’t expect JFK’s assassination in the midst of some worn-out gangster picture. It’s as if The Late Show had been introduced with the words that in the sixties heralded so much unthinkable news: ‘‘We interrupt this program to bring you a Special Report . . .’’ That sense of dislocation, the feeling of seeing the familiar unfold in a funhouse mirror, is in the very air of the conspiracytheory burlesque Winter Kills, which came and went from theaters in one week in the spring of 1979. Less than sixteen years after JFK’s assassination, here was a picture that treated the legends and gossip and theories that had sprung up around the killing as some insanely complicated joke, less national trauma than national tall tale. In the days before home video, the picture’s very existence could seem like a rumor, even if you had seen it. I did, one of three people in the theater watching the Sunday-night late show in a suburban shopping mall twoplex. (It was that or the o√ering across the way, Firepower, featuring James Coburn, Sophia Loren, and O. J. Simpson.) For years afterward, I wondered whether I had really seen it. Surely I had imagined seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Toshiro Mifune in the same movie? Or John Huston striding across the screen in samurai robe and red bikini underwear? Or so many Hollywood faces who rarely appeared in the new Hollywood of the 1970s – Dorothy Malone, Richard Boone...