Director: Larry Buchanan
Cast: George R. Russell, George Edgley, Arthur Nations

I'm pretty proud that I seem to have a more active imagination than what the average person seems to have, enough so that I've mentioned it in my past reviews on several occasions. One thing that I like to imagine is what might possibly happen in the future. Will Netflix, which I love very much, eventually overspend on content so much that they will become bankrupt and go out of business? Will superhero movies, which are so wildly popular right now, eventually go out of style the way that the western genre eventually did? As you can see from those examples, I really like to speculate on possible future events surrounding the entertainment industry. But there are also a lot of times when I like to speculate on what might have happened in the past had circumstances just had been a little (or a lot) different. Take Elvis Presley, for example. Sometimes I wonder if he would have been as greatly embraced by the public had he not dyed his brown hair as black. Also, I wonder greatly what Elvis' life would have been like had his twin brother not died shortly after birth. (Yes, Elvis did have a twin brother - it's surprising that this fact isn't better known in the public mind.) But as you have probably guessed, when I think about Elvis, I mostly think about his contributions to the Hollywood film industry. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had Elvis had not been talked out of lobbying for the lead male role of the Barbra Streisand movie A Star Is Born by his manager Colonel Tom Parker. For that matter, I wonder what would have happened had Elvis earlier in his career told Parker and the Hollywood studios that he was sick of appearing in feeble-minded movies where he had to sing lame songs like Old MacDonald and Song Of The Shrimp.

But while I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about "what if" questions concerning the movie industry in the past and the future, there are certainly a lot of times when I think about another interesting topic - world history in general. There are many times when I wonder what would have happened in world history had things gone a little different. One of my favorite world history "what if" questions I like to think about is, "What would have happened if in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary had not been assassinated?" Just think about that for a couple of minutes, and you will realize just how different things would be in this world of ours more than a hundred years later. (I once watched a YouTube video where it theorized that had the assassination not had happened, Germany would have eventually risen to be the world's biggest superpower, though without Hitler in power.) Going back further in time also raises additional "what if" situations in my mind. What would America been like had the English colonists managed to crush the revolutionary forces that rose in the 18th century? (My guess is, when you compare America to Canada in this day and age, America would have been less screwed up today in a number of key areas.) Thinking back further, what if Attila the Hun not have died when he was about to completely conquer the biggest powers that were then in charge in Europe? Even further, what would have happened thousands of years ago had there not been a land bridge between what is now East Russia and Alaska?

As my "what if" questions about Ferdinand and Attila proved, a lot of what I like to think about concerning past world history focuses on specific individuals. Some of these people I think about have had a very bad reputation, and I dream about what would have happened had they been brought forward to some sort of criminal trial. Naturally, I think about what would have happened had butchers like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Benito Mussolini been put on trial. But it's not just dictators that I think about being tried. There are assorted accused killers that never got a trial for one reason or another, one of them being the notorious Lee Harvey Oswald. What might have been uncovered had he gone to trial? It's fascinating to think about, so you might think that when I got my hands on The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald, I was eager to watch it. Well, part of me was... but then I saw it was directed by the legendary schlock director Larry Buchanan (The Loch Ness Horror), who in his career made cheap and questionable looks at legendary (and conveniently dead) figures such as Marilyn Monroe (Goodbye Norma Jean), Jimi Hendrix / Janis Joplin / Jim Morrison (Down On Us), and Howard Hughes / Jean Harlow (Hughes And Harlow: Angels In Hell). But my curiosity eventually won out, and I sat down to watch the movie. As you have probably guessed, The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald is, well, a "what if" drama concerning itself about what might have happened had Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, had not been killed himself shortly after J.F.K.'s assassination and instead made it to trial. The movie starts in the courtroom with Oswald (played by Charles Mazyrack) being represented by his lawyer Tyler (lead by actor George R. Russell of Free, White, And 21) and his assistants, and the prosecuting team lead by head attorney Atkins (actor Arthur Nations). What follows is first the prosecution's case against Oswald, and then what follows is the defense's arguments.

As I indicated in the above paragraph, The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald is in a way a two part movie. So I thought with this film, I should spend some time focusing on each part and how each part works. Since the prosecution's case opens the movie, I'll first analyze that part. It starts off in an interesting manner (writer/director Buchanan skips opening statements, by the way), with the prosecution first calling witnesses to attest that there was a murder in the first place - I can't think of any other fictional film murder trial starting off that way. After the witnesses who observed Kennedy being shot are questioned, the prosecution moves to the coroner to have him testify the autopsy result. From that point on, the prosecution brings up a myriad of witnesses with encounters with Oswald - his landlady, an elevator operator where he and Oswald worked at, a taxi driver, a librarian, and a forensic expert from the FBI, among others. The prosecution also brings up a recording of Oswald talking to a radio show host about his Marxist viewpoints. It was interesting for me to see that while none of these witnesses (and the recording) by themselves could provide absolute concrete proof that Oswald was the assassin, when all of their testimony is put and examined together... well, it is pretty damning, at least how it is presented in this particualr look into the JFK assassination. And when this movie was filmed, the Warren report had yet to be released, so Buchanan didn't have any of the findings from that report to work with. The defense occasionally brings up a good point to consider when they cross examine the witnesses after the prosecution finishes, such as with a palm print being used as evidence when (at the time) palm prints were not a focus of law enforcement in murder cases, for the most part they don't heavily cross examine. Sometimes they don't even do it at all.

You might be wondering that with this weak handling by the defense during the part of the trial with the prosecution first at the helm, what Buchanan ended up feeling how the second part of the trial would have gone by had Oswald gone on trial. The answer is that the defense goes for a plea claiming that while Oswald did indeed do the shooting, he was not in his right mind, which probably comes as no surprise to many of my readers. This sort of thing has happened in real life high profiled murder cases, such as what the defense teams of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski set out to do. With so much evidence against them, Oswald's defense team only had that particular (slim) chance to work with. In this movie, the only witnesses they call are two psychiatrists, one that testifies Oswald diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirteen, and another one who made the same diagnosis when Oswald was an adult. Also, when the judge asks the defense team if Oswald wants to testify in his defense, his lawyers tell the judge he has decided not to - which is the wisest choice in almost all real-life murder trials. How is that defense? Well, to me it sounded pretty weak, partly due to the lack of witnesses brought up by the defense team, and also because the prosecution shows evidence that Oswald several times clearly knew right from wrong. All the same, during the closing arguments, the defense team once again grasp at straws by emphasizing the schizophrenia diagnosis, while the prosecution pretty much steals the show by mentioning all over again all that evidence from their witnesses. The movie then ends on an interesting note with us the audience being left to decide their own opinion on whether Oswald was legally responsible or not for the assassination.

The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald in several aspects is a fascinating what-if tale, showing in a plausible manner (within the limits of presentation in a motion picture format) possibly how the trial might have happened if Oswald had not been killed. But at the same time, there are some severe flaws that kind of make me reluctant to give it a recommendation, at least a general one. The biggest problem is that almost all of the movie is one witness after another being interrogated, and by the time the movie's first half hour had rolled by, I was simply exhausted. In fact, the movie eventually becomes mostly boring until it gets to the end. Buchanan does try to give the occasional break from this tedium by occasionally showing news footage, as well as newly shot footage of the area in Dallas where Kennedy was shot. But it isn't enough, especially since Buchanan seemingly was forced to reuse some footage several times. Another problem with Buchanan's direction is there is often a real claustrophobic feeling. There are precious few "wide" shots, the camera is almost totally confined to the front of the courtroom, and Buchanan uses the same camera angles way too many times. We also never get to see Oswald clearly, though that might be considered a choice by Buchanan to give Oswald some mystery (or mask that the actor playing Oswald doesn't really look like the real Oswald.) Speaking of the other characters, some of the acting of the cast of amateurs is a bit rough, mostly with George R. Russell's defense attorney character. As I indicated earlier, problems like those I listed make me hesitate to give the movie a good review... but I'm also reluctant to give it a negative review. It might work for audiences if they get to watch it with occasional breaks for commercials or for some other purpose. Despite my mixed feelings about the final product, I'll give it this: I'm pretty sure it beats all the other movies Larry Buchanan made in his career.

(Posted December 19, 2024)