KENNEDY’S SUPPOSED KILLER CONFESSES IN INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSASSIN
President Lyndon Johnson, interviewed for the Warren Report on the assassination of President John Kennedy, expressed the view that there was a conspiracy involving several persons, not a lone gunman. His remark was deleted from the report. In addition, 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 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. The crime, of course, is the assassination of Kennedy; he claims that he shot the fatal bullet from the grassy knoll and that Oswald was picked as the fall guy because he was “stupid.” Ohlinger claims to have been hired by his commanding officer in the Marines, but he does not know who hired him. To corroborate his story, Ohlinger gets a shell casing from the fatal bullet from his bank safety deposit box, and Kobeleski then asks a lab to authenticate when the shell might have been ejected. They go to Dallas to walk where Ohlinger went on November 22, 1963, but the main corroboration would be to locate Ohlinger’s 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, 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 plausibility of the fictional plot leaves some filmviewers hoping that some day the truth will eventually emerge. MH