It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Lamentably uneven film roughly paralleling the Kennedy killing. By the finish, it's hard to tell if the intent is to parody an assassination conspiracy or to offer up food for thought. Of course, the two can be combined, but if so, the results here are sloppy, more head-scratching than suggestive. Much time is spent with Nick (Bridges) chasing shadows, that amount to conspiracies behind conspiracies. Okay, shadows can make for fascinating progression, not knowing who's involved and who isn't. This sense of dislocation was probably best conveyed in 1974's chilling The Parallax View. But here, such suggestive moments are undercut by exaggerations, such as the incredible shooting of the three men in the car, or the ragged development of who Yvette actually is. To me, the only explanation for the frequent piling on of events is that someone was reaching for an element of parody, despite the seemingly dead serious parts.Now I can well understand why the production here wanted to raise questions about the Lone Assassin official theory. It certainly hasn't withstood the test of time, as even a few key frames of the Zapruder film show. Moreover, 1978's House Committee on Assassinations found upon reviewing the evidence that Kennedy "was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy". But then the whole matter was dropped without follow-up. Ironically, I can also understand why officials don't want to pursue the matter. After all, who knows where it might lead or what crises an honest investigation might produce.Anyway, Bridges turns in a riveting and energetic turn as the beleaguered president's brother. If spoof was the movie's intent, Bridges should have been informed since he plays it absolutely straight throughout. Also, veteran director and actor Huston towers as the shady and mysterious patriarch of the clan. Note too, how many veteran Hollywood names settle for brief appearances in an independent production, even super-star Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps they too were unhappy with the Warren Commission Report and wanted to help boost critics who were gathering steam at that time. Of course, the movie debunkings would culminate in 1991's JFK.Though this 90-minutes has its moments, entertaining and suggestive, it's too uneven and inconsistent to really register as either parody or expose.

Until recently that was. If you're a Jeff Bridges fan and look over his previous body of work on IMDb or netflix, you're soon to come across what looks like a small paranoid assassination/conspiracy thriller from the late 1970s- penned by Manchurian Candidate himself Richard Condon- Winter Kills. And then you'll realize until now you've never heard of the movie, unless you were around for the two weekends it was in release in 1979 or heard the minor blurbs how the picture went through ridiculous difficulty getting made. While one shouldn't group the making of the movie too closely with the final product itself, it's almost as crazy a story as in the film itself (one involving the mob, pornographers, marijuana money, and a re-shoot budgeted by *another* movie shot by the same director in-between in Germany).So, as a humble 'who-is-this-guy' movie-buff on this site, I humbly recommend this movie incredibly so. It's a mighty sleeper, a comedy with the intent so black that it's hard to see where the drama stops and the laughs begin. At times it's also weirdly over-the-top (an orgasm at one point is the loudest one has ever seen in a non-porn, and for no real reason except to have it in there, or as part of an "act" perhaps), and with a cast that is irreproachable. Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Elizabeth Taylor - and most of these actors are barely in one scene! Yet everybody leaves there mark so indelibly that one grins from ear to ear suddenly recognizing them (Hayden in particular is a hoot as he practically is like Jack D. Ripper as an old man with a huge beard and a private fleet of tanks)(Huston, too, chews up the scenes he's in without even trying).The plot... geez, I can't really say for certain. Let's just call a spade a spade and say it's a spoof on the Kennedy conspiracy (if there was one), and the power and influence of family and politics and the mob. It's a murder mystery, but it almost becomes moot who was the real killer as by the time its uncovered it's simply more fun seeing how one gets from point A to point B. Though Condon might have had a stronger plot for 'Candidate', and first time director Bill Reichert stumbles in a couple of spots in getting the comedy and suspense mixing just right, it's still amazing entertainment more often than not, and it's one of those nifty, strange treasures to be dug out from the video store or queued on a whim on netflix.

This was before all of the theories were "known." (hah)Kennedy becomes Keegan, Dallas becomes Philly (my hometown), and 11/22/63 becomes 02/22/60. No attempt made to hide the scenario they were portraying either.I agree that the book was too long and detailed for one film. And hearing about guys we just met getting killed in the next scene only helped a little. It moved the story along but seemed like a cop-out.Jeff Bridges seemed too young to be playing the role. They never made ages clear here. He was still great though. And I never thought much of John Huston as an actor. As a director he's brilliant. As an actor he tends to overplay a bit. He re-did his "Chinatown" role here.The name cameos helped. And I'm glad they didn't go nuts with the flashbacks as films like this tend to do. It makes a great spy thriller but not for conspiracy buffs.Watch for......the mother and kid on the bike ...the wig makers view from the window ...the cat on the mafia don's table ...the maid in the bedroom

Richard Condon's novel takes all the conflicting theories about who murdered John Kennedy - the Cubans, the Mob, a lone assassin - and ties them together with a satirical vision of the real motives for that epochal killing. The book is a black vision of American society's values and energies in the '60s and a stimulating read for anyone who remembers the craziness of those years. The film, released in 1979, is necessarily compressed, and so the various threads pursued by Jeff Bridges, playing the half-brother of the dead President Keegan, are less clear and allusive as echoes of what might have happened to Kennedy, and so less interesting. If this story were made as a multi-hour miniseries, with all the (as it turns out, misleading) visions of what really happened given the detail that Condon created for the novel, then both the book and its cinematic adaptation would be better-known. In spite of skilled and nuanced performances by all the cast members, especially Bridges and John Huston, the real horror of the assassination and its aftermath aren't given sufficient satirical power in the film. Still, it's worth watching. Then, you must read the novel.