Four Days in November

I've just rented this movie and let me tell you that, if you do are not familiar with JFK's assassination, this is the best to have or rent.

It speaks about the tragedy from the first day President Kennedy and his wife arrive in Texas, till the sad day of his burial.

The movie is very well narrated and it makes you feel almost like if we were there at that moment.

We can see all the speeches that JFK did until the morning of his assassination, showing a man with a great sense of humor. It's too bad that he left so early. He looked like a great person even if it wasn't the same advice for everyone.

You can't go by the IMDb vote of 6.3 because, if you check out the age/gender breakdown on the voters, its the women (sorry, ladies) who sink the average on this project -- probably giving it a low rating because "it's sad." The men give it a higher rating, presumably because they know it's supposed to be sad.

At any rate, it's a great period piece, a product of its immediate era.

While it's just a compilation of footage and doesn't address anything controversial (e.g., Oswald is presumed "guilty") it's a poignant time capsule, with its noble-tragic tone -- managing to be touchingly doom-riddled and yet somehow ice cold.

It couldn't be anything else.

This black and white documentary, so simple in its chronicling of President Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas with his wife and the Johnsons, is absolutely devastating. The President is charming and funny and the trip is filled with local color such as residents singing Mexican music to the group - yet all the time, you know how it ends and you want to scream.

This film is a no-miss and if you get a chance to see it on History Channel, better yet, as they interview the director during the breaks.

Archival footage is used to recount the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It follows Kennedy before arriving in Dallas as well as following Lee Harvey Oswald's footsteps. There is a small section for the actual shooting in the middle and then the aftermath dominates the second half. It's a very traditional documentary. There is a wall-to-wall old guy narration. It's timely released a year after the assassination. It got nominated for the Oscar. Its traditional newsreel style never really breaks and it follows the story mostly chronologically. The most compelling is probably hearing from Oswald himself and the foreboding description of his life. Basically, it's the standard documentary to encapsulate the event.

Four Days in November (1964)

*** (out of 4)

Oscar-nominated documentary taking a look at the four days in November where the country changed forever. I've watch dozens of documentaries on Kennedy and several just this past week on the 50th Anniversary of the president's assassination. I was rather late coming to see this popular film and even though I've seen quite a few there was still countless bits of footage that I had never seen before. I think what really makes this documentary stand apart is that it was made less than a year after the assassination so needless to say there's all sorts of footage that just typically doesn't get shown today. I think some of the most interesting moments deal with the moments right after the assassination when people were just hanging on to see whether or not the president was going to survive his wounds. The aftermath of course is another thing and it's interesting to note that hints of a conspiracy theory on displayed here and a couple of them would later be used in Oliver Stone's JFK. There's no doubt that history buffs will want to check this thing out because there's simply so much news footage that you really get a great idea of what it was like, television wise, when this happened. I will say that the film feels a tad bit long when watched today and it's also a bit too dry and at times lingers on. Still, there's no question that all the news footage makes this one worth checking out.