Word: oswalds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TRIAL OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD ABC, Sept...
...movie is basically a speculation about what might have happened if Oswald had lived to stand trial. The first half dwells prosaically on the accused assassin's marital problems, his sojourn in Russia and his activities just prior to Nov. 22, 1963. Though Star John Pleshette creates an intriguingly neurotic Oswald, the man remains a cryptic figure. The trial itself, which dominates Part Two, is-well -trying, with fictional lawyers (played bombastically by Lome Greene and Ben Gazzara) wrangling endlessly over their case's voluminous ballistics evidence, Perry Mason-style...
Writer Robert E. Thompson has studded his script with references to most of the conventional Kennedy assassination theories. While he eventually arrives at a verdict on Oswald's guilt (which ABC is keeping secret until air time), so confusing and arbitrary are his data that the verdict might as well be drawn out of a hat. All this Trial really proves is just how effectively television can trivialize even one of the most surefire historical dramas of our time.-Frank Rich
...knowledge of real events, such as President Kennedy's assassination, so that truth and show-biz demands are bound to get mixed up when two networks (ABC and CBS) morbidly return to the scene of the crime this fall and mimic its actuality, with docudramas on Lee Harvey Oswald. Because people are more apt to spot a poor job of makeup than a perversion of the facts, historians worry about television's lopsided history lessons. Last year's Truman at Potsdam made out that his primary motive in dropping the A-bomb on Japan...
...understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner circle until she shot herself in the head the day World War II was declared...