President
Lyndon Johnson, interviewed for the Warren Report on the assassination
of President John Kennedy, expressed the view that there might
have been a conspiracy involving several persons, not a lone
gunman. His remark was deleted from the report. Many witnesses
who might have refuted the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald shot
Kennedy were dead within a very few years. Kennedy's assassination,
in short, is the major unsolved crime of the twentieth century,
ripe for several cinematic treatments. Executive
Action (1973) and JFK
(1991) are now joined this year by Interview with
the Assassin, written and directed by Neil Burger.
When the story begins, Ron Kobeleski (played by Dylan Haggerty),
an out-of-work photojournalist, is about to interview Walter
Ohlinger (played by Raymond J. Barry), a man living on his
block in San Bernardino, for a story about a crime that he
wants to confess. Ohlinger has leukemia and expects to live
only a few months, so he wants his confession on videotape
for posterity, but not for the police, or so he says. The
crime is the assassination of Kennedy; he claims that he shot
the fatal bullet from the grassy knoll. He speculates that
Oswald was picked as the fall guy because he was "stupid."
Ohlinger claims to have been hired by his former commanding
officer in the Marines, but he does not know who, in turn,
hired his CO. To corroborate his story, Ohlinger gets a shell
casing from a bullet in his bank safety deposit box. Kobeleski
then asks a lab to authenticate when the shell might have
been ejected. Next, they go to Dallas to walk where Ohlinger
went on November 22, 1963, but the main corroboration would
be to locate his former CO, who is not easy to find. Then
Kobeleski realizes that he might be a target because of what
he now knows, and the suspense in Interview with
the Assassin builds in a manner similar to The
Blair Witch Project (1999). Titles at the
end say that Kobeleski was arrested, tried, and convicted
of conspiracy but died in prison of multiple stab wounds,
while the shell casing from the lab was stolen and disappeared.
Laughter greeted the trailer of the film in earlier weeks,
but the marginal plausibility of the fictional plot may leave
filmviewers hoping that someday the truth will eventually
emerge. MH
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