Anthony Perkins

Winter Kills

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A bandaged man tells Nick the truth about his dead brother

Nineteen years after the assassination of US President Tim Kegan in 1961, his brother learns from the lips of a dying bandaged man that the official report into who really fired the gun was wrong. I know that, says the dying man, because I was number two rifle that day, and what’s more I’ll tell you where the gun I used has been hidden. Using the murder and bits of the life and family background of President Kennedy as a template, William Richert’s 1979 drama then heads off into the undergrowth for a hack through the weeds of the improbable. Winter Kills isn’t just a conspiracy thriller but a conspiracy thriller constructed like … Read more

Le Procès aka The Trial

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3 shadows

An arch bullshitter of the first water, Orson Welles fell on Franz Kafka’s The Trial like he fell on everything – mountainously. Kafka’s is a simple story – about Joseph K, a man arrested for an unspecified crime, who is taken through a legal process, all the way protesting he’s innocent. Is he? We can never tell, since the narrator is K himself and it’s impossible to work out if he’s lying or not, though he does increasingly come across as a shifty piece of work. Not unlike the artful Mr Welles, who protested to the end of his days that Hollywood had found him guilty of an unspecified crime and had banished … Read more