Is Oliver Stone’s JFK Film Accurate? John F. Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy (1992)
Upon theatrical release, it polarized critics. The New York Times ran an article by Bernard Weinraub entitled, “Hollywood Wonders If Warner Brothers let JFK Go Too Far”. The article called for intervention by the studio, asking “At what point does a studio exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a film maker like Oliver Stone?” The newspaper also ran a review of the film by Vincent Canby who wrote, “Mr. Stone’s hyperbolic style of film making is familiar: lots of short, often hysterical scenes tumbling one after another, backed by a soundtrack that is layered, strudel-like, with noises, dialogue, music, more noises, more dialogue.” Veteran film critic for The Washingtonian, Pat Dowell had her 34-word capsule review for the January issue rejected by her editor John Limpert on the grounds that he didn’t want a positive review for a film he felt was “preposterous” associated with the magazine. Dowell resigned in protest.
The Miami Herald said about the controversy in its review, “the focus on the trivialities of personality conveniently prevents us from having to confront the tough questions [Stone’s] film raises.” However, Roger Ebert praised the film in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, saying, “The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.” Rita Kempley in the Washington Post wrote, “Quoting everyone from Shakespeare to Hitler to bolster their arguments, Stone and Sklar present a gripping alternative to the Warren Commission’s conclusion. A marvelously paranoid thriller featuring a closetful of spies, moles, pro-commies and Cuban freedom-fighters, the whole thing might have been thought up by Robert Ludlum.”
On Christmas Day, the Los Angeles Times ran a critical article entitled, “Suppression of the Facts Grants Stone a Broad Brush.” New York Newsday followed suit the next day with two articles — “The Blurred Vision of JFK” and “The Many Theories of a Jolly Green Giant”. A few days later, the Chicago Sun-Times followed suit with “Stone’s Film Trashes Facts, Dishonors J.F.K.” Jack Valenti, then president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, denounced Stone’s film in a seven-page statement. He wrote, “In much the same way, young German boys and girls in 1941 were mesmerized by Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in which Adolf Hitler was depicted as a newborn God. Both JFK and Triumph of the Will are equally a propaganda masterpiece and equally a hoax. Mr. Stone and Leni Reifenstahl have another genetic linkage: neither of them carried a disclaimer on their film that its contents were mostly pure fiction.”
Stone recalls in an interview, “I can’t even remember all the threats, there were so many of them.” Time magazine ranked it the fourth best film of 1991. Roger Ebert went on to name Stone’s film as the best film of the year and one of the top ten films of the decade. The Sydney Morning Herald named JFK as the best film of 1991. Entertainment Weekly ranked it the 5th Most Controversial Movie Ever.
Years after its release, Stone said of the film that it “was the beginning of a new era for me in terms of film making because it’s not just about a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. It’s also about the way we look at our recent history…It shifts from black and white to color, and then back again, and views people from offbeat angles.”
In his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a history of the assassination published 16 years after the film’s release, Vincent Bugliosi devoted an entire chapter to Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw and Stone’s subsequent film. Bugliosi lists thirty-two separate “lies and fabrications” in Stone’s film and describes the film as “one continuous lie in which Stone couldn’t find any level of deception and invention beyond which he was unwilling to go.” David Wrone stated that “80 percent of the film is in factual error” and rejected the premise of a conspiracy involving the CIA and the so-called military-industrial complex as “irrational”.
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