In 2008, whilst attending a US West Coast Swing dance event in Dallas, I stayed on after the event’s completion to experience Dallas as a city and a community and inevitably, part of my journey would take in an official tour of the JFK legacy.
I went to Dealey Plaza. I stood on the Grassy Knoll, on the plinth where Abraham Zapruder shot his legendary footage of the JFK motorcade as it drove by and stood on the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in the very place where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly carried out the act.
The reason I share this is that seventeen years earlier, I had sat through Oliver Stone’s JFK, enthralled at the whole history of the so-called conspiracy theories about ‘what really happened that day’ as Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) relays to the jury in the third part of the epic three-hour film.
Opening with a brief history of Kennedy’s election to President (narrated by an uncredited Martin Sheen (APOCALYPSE NOW) plus the backstory to what happened at Dallas on 22nd November 1963, the film then cuts to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Jim Garrison) as he hears of the tragedy and watches it with a colleague, Lou (Jay O Sanders) at a local bar.
He then questions David Ferrie (Joe Pesci, GOODFELLAS) over the allegation that he was a getaway driver for Oswald, but the charges are dropped.
Three years later, he is conversing with a Senator (Walter Matthau) on a flight who brings up the idiosyncrasies of the bullets that were allegedly fired by Oswald. Garrison invites Lou and another colleague, Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker) to take a walking tour of local pleasures to start putting a case together that could alter the history of legalities and the JFK murder case itself…..
Filled with incredible insights and information that warrant several viewings, coupled with brilliant cinematography by Robert Richardson, JFK, which was based on two books, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS and CROSSFIRE: THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, is a triumph of editing and acting, with a terrific ensemble cast which includes the likes of Luurie Metcalf, Sissy Spacek, Kevin Bacon, the late John Candy, Jack Lemmon and Donald Sutherland as X, who provides one of the most riveting scenes in Washington when he explains a bit of backstory as to what should have happened on the day of the assassination.
Nominated for several Oscars, although it lost out to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in the end. JFK still proved to be one of the quality films of 1991.