Week in Review: JFK Cinema Finale

Watch for what's coming on the Joannides File

Hyannis, MA (Credit: Jerry Callaghan/Shutterstock.com)

Heads up for continuing revelations from the July 3 release of the Joannides File. (You can analyze it on the Mary Ferrell Foundation site here.) More coming this week about “A Spy Called ‘Howard’.”

Axios’ Marc Caputo appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Show and described:

His name was George Joannides, and he's one of the more interesting characters to emerge later in the narrative of what we understand about the JFK assassination — and the way in which the government hid documents and evidence and information about it.

JFK Cinema in the 2010s

Chad Nagle completed the 60-year saga of films — the good, the bad, and the “they did it” — which have centered on or touched on the 1963 assassination and its consequences. In the 2010s, he writes, Hollywood blockbusters tried to smother the legacy of Oliver Stone's 'JFK,' but scripted hints of popular doubt over Warren Report orthodoxy still cropped up.

The 2013 feature film “Parkland” added nothing new to the official story of the assassination, instead bringing endless close-ups of anguished faces depicting an American public shocked and saddened at a beloved president’s demise, with a shaky camera and unsteady imagery adding a vague queasiness to the dramatic equation.
The balance of 2010s films described by Nagle contain just brief references to a mysterious “they.” Nagle writes:

In the final analysis, “they” are the feeble echoes of Dallas in Hollywood — “They killed our man,” “Oh, my God! They killed him,” “Let them see what they’ve done,” and “If they can whack a president” — so brief in screenplays that you might miss them if your phone were to ring.

This is the last in a six-part series on how Hollywood moviemakers have portrayed and distilled the JFK assassination. Part 1, the Sixties: Here. Part 2, the Seventies: Here. Part 3, the Eighties: Here. Part 4, The Nineties: Here. The 2000s: Here.

Echoes of Dallas: Six Decades of JFK on the Silver Screen — The Twenty-Tens

Tribute to Joan Mellen

Jeff Morley marked the passing of historian Joan Mellen, Temple University professor and author of 24 books on history, cinema, Japan, and the assassination of JFK, and posted the link to his 2024 interview with a “Great Teacher,” who could talk knowledgeably about Luis Buñuel, Marilyn Monroe, Akira Kurosawa, Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Knight.

Prof. Mellen even authored the only noteworthy biography of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas-based Russian acquaintance, George De Mohrenschildt, “Our Man in Haiti” (2012).

RIP Joan Mellen: Biographer, Historian, Film Critic, and JFK Scholar

Tweet of the Week

OK, it’s Truth Social, not X. But still….😂