Echoes of Dallas: Six Decades of JFK on the Silver Screen — The Seventies

Hollywood's thoughtful treatment of the assassination gives way to inanity and mockery until the torch of solemnity is passed (again) to France

A scene from 1974’s “The Parallax View,” directed by Alan J. Pakula. (Credit: IMDb)

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

In the mid-to-late 1970s, congressional committees were taking up the JFK assassination as an issue for serious reinvestigation. Three or four months prior to the start of hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), the ABC television network screened the Zapruder film, the 8-mm home movie shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, capturing the fatal shooting of President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Conveying the strong impression to the public that Kennedy was struck from the front, something ruled out in the Warren Report of 1964, the film heightened mistrust of the official version of JFK’s death.

But earlier in the decade, two notable American movies specifically addressed the issue of assassination conspiracy from an unorthodox angle. Combining residual public doubts about the official (Warren Commission) version of the crime with artful experimentation, they would set a precedent for Oliver Stone’s masterpiece, “JFK,” nearly two decades later.