Dir: Oliver Stone | Cast: Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon | US Drama 183’
Not to be trusted as history – John Frankenheimer’s TV movie ‘Path to War’ is much fairer to LBJ – but amply compensating for the childish bombast of most of Oliver Stone’s oeuvre, ‘JFK’ deservedly won Academy Awards for photography and editing.
A lot of dirty linen has since come out about Kennedy, while Jim Garrison is simplistically portrayed as played by Kevin Costner as a bespectacled, pipe-smoking everyman, while feminists may take issue with Sissy Spacek’s thankless role as Garrisons’s whiny wife. The greatest casting coup has to be Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald – the principal villain naturally being a Brit – with Donald Sutherland coming close.
New Orleans is very well used as a location, but paradoxically the meticulous attention to period detail creates a false sartorial impression since the action manages to continue into the late sixties without any of the men growing shaggier. @RichardChatten
NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS