The Parallax View: a JFK film that gets it right

[MinM]

Parkland and other movies about JFK's assassination show just how far to the right Hollywood has shifted. Alan J Pakula's classic film, however, is a high point of New American Cinema

...After a couple of films in 1967 – the documentary Rush to Judgment and Bruce Conner's experimental short film Report – that critiqued the Warren commission's findings, in 1973 a Hollywood feature called Executive Action arrived. It mixed documentary footage with live action, and portrayed the assassination as a conspiracy by the CIA and big business interests. Executive Action is a decent, strangely low-key film; what's interesting is just how mainstream it was. Burt Lancaster played the CIA coup leader, while Robert Ryan and Will Geer played Texas oil men who want Kennedy dead. Dalton Trumbo, once blacklisted, wrote the script, and the film was directed by David Miller, whose CV contains another good picture, Lonely Are the Brave.

Hollywood later revisited the Kennedy assassination with Winter Kills (1979), based on Richard Condon's paranoid thriller; Ruby (1992), a stumbling biopic about Lee Harvey Oswald's killer Jack Ruby; and most famously in 1991 with JFK, Oliver Stone's epic mega-budget version of events. JFK is a hagiography of Kennedy theorist Jim Garrison, a bombastic New Orleans prosecutor and homophobe who tried to convict a gay CIA associate, Clay Shaw, of the president's murder. Garrison's case was ultimately unconvincing: a jury found Shaw innocent, which undercuts Stone's telling of history. Nevertheless, the film provoked a public outcry and led to the release of thousands of previously secret files by the Assassination Records Review board.

For my money, the best JFK conspiracy movie isn't, strictly speaking, about the Kennedy assassination. Made in 1974, Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View borrows from the murders of both Kennedy brothers to tell the tale of a mysterious organisation, the Parallax Corporation, which deals in political assassination and the creation of "lone assassin" patsies.

The reader will recall that Lee Harvey Oswald, during his brief time in the custody of the Dallas police, denied murdering the president and cried out to reporters: "I'm a patsy! I'm a patsy!" – strange behaviour for someone who, according to Parkland and the Warren Report, killed Kennedy to become famous. The Parallax View, written by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne, describes how such patsies are created...

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/nov/19/the-parallax-view-kennedy-assassination

[Jacoby365]

1. For those who have not seen this film

I highly recommend it. Excellent!

[duffyduff]

2. Lee Harvey Oswald was a nutjob

I wouldn't watch anything that twists history.

Sorry, there is no evidence of a conspiracy, and it's time for people to grow up and accept it.

[heaven05]

4. be grown up like you?

no thanks. I prefer an open mind.

[stopbush]

5. I assume your mind is also open to the idea of the Earth being only 6,000 years old.

How about the existence of Zeus? Is your mind open to that as well?

I ask, because the JFK CTs are on the same level as those topics.

[heaven05]

8. If you say so.

I just don't agree with your assessment. Period. You're entitled to a narrow view because of a closed mind, good luck.

[stopbush]

10. No, I tend to follow the evidence. If the evidence isn't good enough for you

you're welcome to your fantasies.

[heaven05]

11. like I said, you're entitled to your assumptions

and assumptions they are, period.

[pacalo]

14. Do you think the government always tells the truth?

[cpwm17]

15. It's not a matter of believing the government

We have the evidence. We can evaluate the evidence just as easily as government officials.

The evidence proves that Oswald killed JFK and there is no evidence that he had help. I don't need any government official to tell me how to think.

[pacalo]

16. You stick to your evaluation of the "evidence" & I'll stick to mine.

60% of the American people who were recently polled do believe there is more to the JFK assassination than what we were told to believe.

[cpwm17]

17. Most people don't know the facts

so their opinion means little.

[pacalo]

18. I see.

[stopbush]

22. Exactly.

[dflprincess]

20. Two of the Warren Commission members publicly said they did not believe Oswald acted alone

(John Sherman Cooper & Richard Russell) and a third, Hale Boggs, made it clear he had his doubts. All three objected to the way the FBI was allowed to run the investigation.

[stopbush]

23. And Michael Moore thinks OJ didn't kill his wife.

Your point?

[dflprincess]

36. My point is that you who defend the Commission's version

always treat it as some all-knowing entity never mentioning that 1/3 of its members didn't believe the story it told.

[Politicalboi]

28. So Oswald called off

The secret service guys on JFK's car so he could get a better shot. Amazing.

[stopbush]

21. No. Do you think CTists do?

[pacalo]

24. Frankly, I'm offended by your use of the JFK avatar.

A true admirer of his would not have an attitude of complete dismissal about what happened to him, not to mention being contemptible toward those who have a different opinion than you do. I lived through the days when only right-wingers did that. I'm not so sure that anything has changed in that regard.

[cpwm17]

30. Oswald murdered Kennedy

That's a fact.

You have every right to blame innocent people for Kennedy's assassination. Many of us don't feel the need to let off Kennedy's assassin so easily. Oswald killed Kennedy. The evidence proves it. Also, the evidence strongly indicates that he had no help, and there certainly is zero evidence that he had help.

[pacalo]

33. Your reply at #17 pretty much conveys how you feel.

You should use the auto-keyword-trash function instead of disrupting threads that pertain to JFK.

[MinM]

31. Book about Lee Harvey Oswald ©1962

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41fdUrtLKqL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

A book about Oswald written BEFORE the JFK assasination!

By "rodney23" on May 3, 2000

Kerry Thornley was stationed in Japan with Lee Harvey Oswald at one of only two US bases where LSD experiments took place. It's Thornley's contention that the purpose of these experiments was to create "Manchurian Candidates" - assassins on autopilot. This could be dismissed as a paranoid rant, but this book was written before Nov. 22, 1963. Hmmm, maybe that's why it's no longer in print. If you do manage to get your hands on a copy, count yourself among the lucky.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Idle-Warriors-Kerry-Thornley/dp/0962653403

[Enthusiast]

32. LOL

[dipsydoodle]

3. Great film - Parallax View.

[stopbush]

6. Er, I'd think that films like Parkland that deal with the facts

in the JFK murder are the high point in American cinema as they deal with the truth.

All of those other films mentioned are fictions, and fictions pushing a fact-free agenda.

[Proud Public Servant]

7. Another great film: Winter Kills

Also fiction, but a rich imagining of the meaning of the Kennedy assassination and the shadowy world of elites. Bombed when it came out, now considered a classic 70s conspiracy film.

[dogknob]

9. Some of the responses here are hilarious.

As if making a straight-up documentary about JFK would have been even remotely possible during Nixon's presidency.

Making The Parallax View took courage. Parkland is spineless PR and nothing but. Dallas has been priming the cash-cow teats for the big 5-0 for a few years now.

[Doctor_J]

12. Damn scary movie. Probably much too close to reality

the "single bullet" devotees are kooky imo. Read Michael Parenti's take on the whole deal.

[jakeXT]

13. They missed "The Package" with Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones

[villager]

26. "The Package" is very underrated as well

Not sure I've even seen it since it came out...!

[blkmusclmachine]

19. For a good companion piece, go read about Operation Northwoods. Hand in glove, hand in glove...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662

"In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba..."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662

[Uncle Joe]

27. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, MinM.

[CrawlingChaos]

29. I recall it was an excellent film. I would love to see it again.

Good lord, you'd never see that movie made today. Really makes me think about what a different time the '70s were. I was just a teenager, but I recall vividly the vibe - the momentum swinging away from authoritarianism, and the growing distrust. It seemed like for this brief window of time people were actually willing to see the world the way it really works. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of people. Too much message control in place now for that to happen again - that is, until we reach some sort of breaking point. I hope I live to see it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

34. And then Reagan got elected, and the pop songs suddenly shifted to things like

"I Need a Hero" ("and he's gotta be fresh from the fight&quot and one whose title I can't remember but which had the repetitious refrain "You'll never change the world."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

35. Executive Action was recommended by an otherwise non-political friend

and I found it chilling.

Whether the assassination theory is true or not, the portrayal of a bunch of rich white guys disdaining ordinary people and talking about "thinning the herd" rang true.

[dflprincess]

37. "Chilling" is the same word I used to describe "Executive Action"

And it did ring true.

[Myrina]

38. ... one would think now, with so much of the Koch/Carlyle agenda echoing that same philosophy ...

... people wouldn't be so dismissive of a MIC-Big Oil conspiracy theory.