The Best & The Worst: Winter Kills

This is a potential new feature here at Poseidon's Underworld, a stab a short posts that point out what we find to be the best and worst aspects of a particular project without going into a full-on review. As we are sure to be receiving a very heavy amount of work in 2018, there may be more brief postings versus the intensive ones you may have come to expect. Anyway... in this first one, we'll cover the worst first!

The Worst:  For reasons known only to director William Richert, 1979's Winter Kills, a politically-oriented black comedy, features an extended scene of a craggy and out-of-shape, seventy-three year-old John Huston in a skimpy pair of red briefs and little else. He wakes up his son Jeff Bridges to rail against his enemies.

It's difficult to focus on the content of his outraged monologue to costar Jeff Bridges as we are confronted by his pale, mashed-potato-lumpy physique which is in no way made more palatable by a cream-colored robe. (This comes after we've already watched a rather sultry young woman fondle his debauched character through his slacks while sitting in a golf cart!)

The Best: Thankfully on hand to salve our scorched corneas is a youthful and attractive Jeff Bridges, who has another scene of his in bed, clearly without benefit of pajamas.

Bridges eventually sits up and shows off the fact that he's been sleeping au naturel. Just on the cusp of thirty, he was in good shape at this time.

During this sequence of the movie, Bridges has a love scene with Belinda Bauer and after he gets up to walk around, the frame zooms in optically - becoming grainy and blurred - and in essence crops out what I am certain was at one point a rear or even partially frontal nude scene. The movie has never been particularly easy to find and has been cut in various different versions, so I don't know if anyone ever got to see him in the altogether before someone took it upon himself to edit it out. But if you're in the right frame of mind, the film has some interest and contains a fairly fascinating supporting cast. 

  

******* UPDATE!! *******

There was a certain degree of debate as to whether or not this movie had been augmented after its initial release and I am here to tell you that indeed it was. I still don't know who was behind it - so to speak, but someone made the decision to excise Jeff Bridges' rear nudity. Never one to let anything rest if I smell a rat, I have come up with some photographic evidence of the scene as it was ORIGINALLY shown. The shots seen below are not visible on the "restored" prints or the DVD. So strange, annoying and, in a way, untrue to the film as it was intended (and certainly Mr. B. had nothing to be ashamed of.) My apologies for the third or fourth generation quality of the images. It was the best that could be done under such dire circumstances!

**********SECOND UPDATE!***********

This appears to be the post that will not die. I was very unhappy with the quality of the images above and happened to find a copy of this film that was thankfully left in its original form. So I have once again gotten my mitts on some views of Mr. Jeff Bridges that are far clearer and more revealing! So here, again, is the best of Winter Kills.

And now, finally, The End!