Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge, The JFK Assassination in Art and Film, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) pp161-163

He felt connect to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signal and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission. Marina was asleep. They were running a message through the night into his skin. Frank Sinatra sets up a high-powered rifle in the window and waits for the train to arrive. Lee knew he would fail. It was, in the end, a movie.¹

In Libra, his brilliant work of assassination fiction, Don DeLillo illustrates this often-remarked-upon incident of October 19, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, watching television with his wife on a Saturday night, sees Suddenly, Lewis Allen's 1954 film about an attempt to assassinate he president. The movie presents Frank Sinatra as a returned and troubled veteran, a would-be assassin who impersonates a Secret Service agent. Commandeering the house of a widowed mother whose husband had died in combat, the killers set up their shooter's nest in the family living room. Perched on a grassy knoll, the house overlooks the railroad station at which the president's train is scheduled to stop. Assassination critics on both sides of the conspiracy debate cited the historical coincidence, only implying what DeDillo openly imagined-the cinema as subtle motivator, source of identification, and ideological transmission.² In this case, the desire to assign the camera some sinister psychic capacity may indeed be best suited to fiction, because subsequent research by assassination critics suggested that Suddenly was in fact not broadcast in the Dallas area on the night of October 19.³ Nonetheless, the tantalizing coincidence this scene offered to writers and its presence ins stories about Oswald registered genuine faith in the suggestive powers of narrative film. It lent one more aspect to the cubist portrait of Oswald, here the impressionable movie watcher whose personal mission and historical identity are reflected back to him by the cinematic mirror.

Suddenly was not the only film reinvested with the meanings that emerged from the assassination debates. Indeed, while the buffs cited Oswald's possible connections to Suddenly, the producers of The Manchurian Candidate cited the approval bestowed upon them by JFK.⁴ Perhaps the outstanding example of Hollywood's returning vet and cold war scenarios, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is as significant here for its exhibition history as for its story of Raymond Shaw, the brainwashed assassin programmed to kill a presidential candidate. Kept off television for most of the two decades following its release, it was long rumoured to be sequestered by its star, Frank Sinatra, ostensibly because its subject matter resonated too closely with the echoes of tragedy and conspiracy surrounding the death of JFK. It thus became something of a Hollywood equivalent to the Zapruder footage, its content considered too shocking for broadcast or too liable to reopen the nation's emotional wounds. When in 1988 the film was released in theatres nationwide and then cablecast on television, these reasons for its absence turned out to be apocryphal.⁵ Still, this rationale for its status as absent text had clearly been influenced by the assassination debates. Not only its "suspicious" disappearance from the movie and television screen, but also the public's ability to contend with inflammatory aspects of the film's plot became inseparable questions about a possible conspiracy that were raised during the period of the film's absence. Indeed, the rerelease publicity used to market The Manchurian Candidate in 1988 played on these factors, declaring the film "Once Unbelievable, Now Unthinkable." The rhetoric of this publicity suggested that in the quarter-century that had passed, the sinister implications of the assassination literature had been sufficiently digested, if not legitimized, for the film's tale of conspiracy, incest, and internal subversion now to resemble shocking news more than science fiction.

Still other films, made after Kennedy's death, offered oblique references to the assassination or had their more violent moments read in hindsight through the prism of the JFK controversy. At the end of Arthur Penn's The Chase (1965), for example, Bubber Reeves is taken into custody by Sheriff Calder, only to be murdered Oswald-style on the courthouse steps. The film's narrative and mise-en-scene run parallel to aspects of the assassination: a southern town populated by hate and handguns, death at the police station, Calder's cowboy hat matching that worn by the deputy sheriff who accompanied Oswald, Calder's wife named Ruby, the grieving mother and widow left behind, the shots to the stomach in full police view.⁶ In Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Penn returned to referencing Kennedy's death, although here his comment seems harder to grasp. In an interview with the Cashiers du Cinema, the director noted that the head wound inflicted on Clyde Barrow at film's end was intended as an illusion to JFK's head wound.⁷

Yet, despite the assassination narratives at the center of Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate, they are not among the films I want to focus on in Part Three. Nor am I particularly interested in citing or interpreting every reference or possible allusion to the assassination or conspiracy in films made after the 1963 events in Dallas. Rather, I want to pursue close readings of five films. Three of these borrow narrative incidents from the assassination scenario but do not declare themselves as overtly about the investigation into a possible JFK conspiracy: The Parallax View (1971), Winter Kills 1979), and Blow Out (1981). The other two films mark explicit engagement with the JFK investigation: Executive Action (1973) and JFK (1991). Rather than using the assassination as narrative background, as in In the Line of Fire (1993), or as the dramatic setting for fictional biography, as in Ruby (1992), these films are thoroughly inscribed by the discourses of investigation, tapping deeply into the issues and problems discussed in Part One. No doubt such films as In the line of Fire reflect certain contours of the thirty-year debate. The assassin as master of disguise takes it cue from the conspiracy literature's image of Oswald as changing man. The film also inscribes the master perspective fixed by the Zapruder imagery, most notably when Secret Service agent Eastwood recalls Dallas 1963 and the corresponding on-screen image, supposedly representing his own subjective view, shows the assassination from Zapruder's vantage point on the grassy knoll rather than that of someone running alongside the limousine.

Still, the films I want to consider make the investigation process the defining concept for their narratives. Although they extend and inflect questions pertaining to the epistemological status of the photographic/filmic image, their narrative formats produce a somewhat less direct encounter with these issues than those enacted by the pop and underground works analysed in Part Two. A close reading of these films will take the analysis in directions unavailable to the Warhol silkscreens or the work of Bruce Conner, prompting considerations of narrative structure, character motivation, and the ways the assassination debate was fitted to the generic demands of commercial cinema. For DeLillo's Oswald, Suddenly was in the end more than a movie; it resonated beyond the television, it addressed his past, it warned of the future. So too, the meanings of these films extended beyond their commercial frame, linking up with and reformulating the historiographic issues and images which, as we have seen, informed diverse social settings and inspire artistic practice.

[ Footnotes ]

1. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988), 370.

2. For critics who cite the Suddenly incident, see Pricilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 380 and Robert G Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981), 361.

3. In his annotated guide to assassination film, TV, and video, Anthony Frewin cites the work of Gary Mack who, in researching the TV listings for Dallas during the week of October 12 through 26, found no mention of Suddenly. Frewin acknowledges that Oswald may well have seen the film, but not at he crucial point reported by other writes. Anthony Frewin, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV, and Videography, 1963-1992, with a foreword by Martin Short (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 1993), 93. It may also be worth noting that, in their reference to Suddenly, Blakey and Billings misidentify the year of the film as 1959.

4. In a promotional interview piece for the film's cablecast on Cinemax, Frank Sinatra discusses with director John Frankenheimer and screenwriter George Axelrod how Kennedy told him how much he liked the novel by Richard Condon and looked forward to the screen version.

5. In his 1988 review of the film, Thomas Doherty reports that Sinatra did not know he held the distribution rights to the film until he learned of it in an interview with Richard Condon, author of the novel. Thomas Doherty, "A Second Look," Cineaste 16 (1988):31