Death in Dallas

Four Days in November. The story of John F. Kennedy's assassination has been told with impressive amplitude in the words of the Warren Commission's report. But pictures can indeed speak louder than words. This film, the first in which the massive photographic record (more than 2,000,000 ft.) of the tragedy is assembled and analyzed, adduces no new evidence, proposes no exotic theories. Produced by David Wolper, who in 1963 put together a prizewinning TV documentary (The Making of the President, 1960) about Kennedy's election, Four Days is essentially an extended newsreel, a rough anthology of television tapes, amateur movies and reconstructed scenes. Much of the footage has never been shown before; some of it is striking.

The first 24 hours of the Texas tour are roses all the way, a gay and triumphal procession. There they stand on top of the world as though it were their wedding cake: Jack and Jackie the glass of feminine fashion and the mold of masculine form, the prince and princess of a political fairy tale that surely was not meant to have an unhappy ending. "Stop!" the spectator cries silently. "Stop before it's too late!" Impossible. They are in the car, and already it is turning into Elm Street, into the sunlit circle of Oswald's telescopic sight.

The climax, so magnificently prepared, is inexplicably permitted to become an anticlimax. The death of the President was recorded in several still photographs and on three film strips--though only one of the strips, owned by LIFE, shows the episode in full detail. Nevertheless, the moment of tragedy is represented here in a single frozen frame that shows Kennedy as an overblown blur.

The assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald is also depicted ineptly. The spectator is plunged into the episode without warning of what is about to happen, and the deed is done so swiftly that the eye can scarcely follow it. Yet the moviemakers do not even bother to repeat in slow motion a scene that is surely one of the most exciting and significant stretches of live action ever shown on a screen.

Among the failures, happily, there are fascinations: Oswald's frowsy but amiable landlady, the enormously corpulent cabby who picked him up after the crime, the curly-haired, fine-featured shoe salesman who tracked him to the Texas Theater, the clean, sunny, comfortable ranch house where the killer lived with his wife and children. At one point the film reports without comment that only five hours before he killed the President, Oswald was telling a friend how much he enjoyed playing with his baby daughter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.