JFK Cinema: Assassination Conspiracy as Spaghetti Western

In 1969, the plot to kill Kennedy hit the big screen — dubbed over Italian accents

A movie poster for “The Price of Power (Credit: Rendezvous Cinema/ebay)

“The Price of Power” (“Il prezzo del potere”) was a movie so bad it never debuted in movie theaters in the United States. According to the film’s IMDb page, this box office bust was only released in cinemas abroad over a period spanning more than seven years from December 1969, when it was released in Italy, to March 1976, when it expired in Norway.

The film’s Wikipedia page cites a very modest 1.273 billion lire box office take: equivalent to about $2 million at the time. Director Tonino Valerii was known for making what were called Spaghetti Westerns, movies about America’s 19th-century cowboys produced in contemporary Italy or Spain, which had vaguely Western landscapes.

Valerii oversaw forgotten epics such as “Day of Anger” (1967) with Lee Van Cleef; “A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die!” (1972), with James Coburn and Telly Savalas; and “My Name is Nobody” (1973), with Henry Fonda and Terence Hill. While products of this popular genre sometimes appeared intentionally bad, they were popular, commanding big names and respectable budgets.

“The Price of Power,” a pure product of the genre, doesn’t have any big names, but it does qualify as one of the earliest major (or minor) motion pictures inspired by JFK’s assassination. It’s now available on Amazon Prime under a new title: “A Bullet for the President.”