Echoes of Dallas: Six Decades of JFK on the Silver Screen, Part 1

The assassination story refracted through Tinseltown's lens — which more often than not points away from any suggestions of conspiracy

A magnified image in a photograph from the 1966 film “Blow-Up” (Credit: IMDb)

This is the first in a six-part series exploring how the JFK assassination has been portrayed and distilled by Hollywood moviemakers.

Mainstream American cinema has almost entirely ignored the question of whether the official history of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination merits any serious doubt. The most conspicuous exception, of course, is “JFK” (1991), directed by Oliver Stone. That 3-hour-and-9-minute epic (the Director’s Cut, released in 2008, runs an extra 16 minutes) garnered eight Academy Award nominations and two wins.

Conspiracism aside, that kind of recognition of superior artistry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences across so many categories — directing, acting, cinematography, editing, production, and more — represented a serious “establishment” concession, namely, that a major Hollywood feature film signaling that Kennedy was killed because he was “so dangerous to the establishment” deserved high acclaim for creative excellence.

Nevertheless, “JFK” has proven anomalous in American cinema. The establishment anti-conspiracy consensus — speaking for a minority of the U.S. population to this day — has retained the upper hand in mainstream American film since the 1960s, with Hollywood generally refusing to question the government-approved “lone gunman” version of the crime and relegating dissent to an independent documentary filmmaking subculture.