JFK: The Smoking Gun
JFK: The Smoking Gun
| 15 November 2013 (USA)
JFK: The Smoking Gun Trailers

Seventy-five percent of the American people still refuse to believe the official story of President John F. Kennedy's death. They do not think he was killed by a lone gunman but by a mysterious cabal that somehow conspired to have him killed. How can this be? How can a crime this famous, witnessed and investigated by so many, remain a mystery? This is what veteran Australian police detective Colin McLaren is determined to find out. JFK: The Smoking Gun follows the forensic cold-case investigation McLaren conducted over four painstaking years, taking us back to that tragic day in Dallas at Dealey Plaza where the shooting took place, to Parkland Hospital where the president was pronounced dead, to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where the autopsy was conducted and to the conclusions of the Warren Commission that have remained controversial to this day.

Reviews
Steineded

How sad is this?

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Neive Bellamy

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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Lachlan Coulson

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

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Haven Kaycee

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

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wondercritic

These documentaries are CIA-approved and thus worth very little. They use paid actors for reenactments and "experts" on ballistics and so forth, but they always operate within predefined limits. One sacrosanct principle that can NEVER be questioned in any of these productions is that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the gunmen and was on the 6th floor of the Book Depository at the time of the shooting. They refer to Warren Commission findings, as if by repeating them, the viewing public will never question them. But the Warren Commission is legally discredited, as any lawyer worth his or her salt will tell you. The Warren Commission was not a court or even a proper investigative body. It was a stitch-up.There is no material evidence that Oswald was on the 6th floor - no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no forensics of any kind. So a documentary like this that hypothesizes that Oswald "could not have fired the fatal head shot" isn't really that useful. A shot from behind and to the left, as this film asserts, seems "new," but it doesn't really matter, does it? The kill shot probably didn't come from that direction, considering the massive EXIT WOUND at the back of JFK's head on his right side. It most likely came from the right side, or from inside the sewer drain on Elm Street. Who cares? Thinking, informed people already know Oswald didn't fire that shot. This whole film is meant to divert and distract. It posits a conspiracy at cover-up by the Secret Service, a small agency, not the CIA? Give us a break. What rubbish.At the end of the day, thinking people know that the JFK assassination was a coup d'etat by the national security state. Nothing this documentary says makes a whit of difference to that. So this film is just another addition to the garbage heap of mainstream media commentary on this tragic event.

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lomaran-1

No, I don't believe it for a second. The Zapruder film shows the final shot hitting JFK on the front right. His right. His head went back. He could not have been shot from behind and Oswald, when he was found in the book depository, was in the employee's meal room - seated very calmly. He fired zero bullets. A great book to read is 'Me and Lee', if you want (what I believe to be) the truth regarding Oswald. If you can find it, watch The History Channel's 'Smoking Gun'. It only aired once and was immediately pulled after complaints from LBJ's family. It is VERY compelling. Interesting too how 'the powers that be' have tried to kill it. Sometimes you can find it on YouTube.

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Michael Wehle

This film was not worth an hour and a half of my time. There's about 20 minutes of material stretched with endless repetition and reenactments so it'll be suitable for broadcast with commercial interruptions every ten minutes. The constant recitation of what was just said a few minutes before gave me vertigo. If you *must* watch this movie you may want to do so in five or ten minute stretches.Howard Donahue's thesis is an interesting one, I think Donahue did solid work in researching it and Menninger lays it out well in Mortal Error. The Smoking Gun, however, fails to adequately explain Colin McLaren's presence, and what if anything he added to Donahue and Menninger's work.

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blanche-2

This documentary explores another theory of the JFK assassination.In this theory, there were two shooters, Lee Harvey Oswald and a Secret Security agent named George Hickey in the other car.I can't say whether or not it's any truer than anything else, but I'll say this. These documentaries always make compelling stories. Why? Because they take a moment, a statement, a situation, and make a decision about it, usually that it has an ulterior motive, and build a conspiracy theory around it.For instance, at the hospital in Dallas, the Secret Service would not allow the doctor there to perform the autopsy. They demanded the body be returned to Washington. EVIL COVER-UP. Give me a break. This is the President of the United States, and they're going to let a local doctor do the autopsy? Here's another one -- There were all these photographs taken by various people who were there that day, and the Secret Service took the photos and never returned them. HELLO. This was the assassination of a U.S. President, not May Day photos of children dancing around a pole with flowers. OF COURSE they took the photos, every single photo had to be examined.My favorite - eyewitness accounts that fly in the face of what was said by other witnesses who testified at the Warren Commission hearings. Ever asked a bunch of witnesses of a crime what the culprit looked like? You're telling me that shots were fired, people hit the ground, screamed, and then are able to give reliable testimony? They counted the shots? They watched someone stand up in a car? Here's another and it was mentioned constantly. All the chaos in the room at the hospital, all the yelling, all the people, the jostling. RIGHT. THE PRESIDENT HAD JUST BEEN SHOT. You're expecting total silence while people are trying to find out if he's alive or dead, make arrangements to swear in Johnson, get some sort of announcement together for reporters, keep news from getting out before there are definitive answers, keep people who don't belong there away from the body? Chaos. Gee, wouldn't have expected that with the President's body there.So did the Secret Service guy fire a third shot? The theory here is that it was friendly fire and they wanted to cover up that fact. Others on this board think it wasn't an accident, he was aiming at the President. Now, if he was aiming at the President, they really needed to terminate him and put him in prison. Why wouldn't they have done that? All the Secret Service hated JFK and wanted to see him dead? What is the point of covering up what this guy did, if he did it? Covering it up to the public -- okay, yes, I can see that. We pay their salaries. But why close ranks to help a traitor? Also, do we honestly think this was the fatal shot? I'm sorry, the poor man was hit in the back and the head before this third shot. Not sure if he would have survived and if he had, I doubt he would have been able to hold the office of President.I go into this type of thing skeptical because there are so many conspiracy theories about absolutely everything, and it seems like someone can go through the literature and come up with an alternate idea of what happened.It's always the same thing: Elvis is alive and living over a bowling alley; JFK survived and is probably living with him; Hitler survived; Princess Diana was murdered; we didn't get the real story of 9/11; etc. Meanwhile, try to get your doctor's office to fax something, or ask an office to find the fax you've sent five times, or have someone read your email correctly and give you the info you asked for -- how can you have a conspiracy when everybody is always screwing up? Do I think the Warren Commission gave us the real story? No, of course not. We are much more savvy today and we know that the government lies, and whatever the commission couldn't explain, it pretended it didn't happen. Eighty witnesses say 65 different things, you go with the fifteen who said the same thing. Do I believe that the Dallas police really cared if anyone shot Oswald? Obviously they were hoping someone would come along and kill him while they were meandering through a parking space on the way to a truck that was obviously not close to where they came from.This theory is just as viable or ridiculous as any other one. We won't ever know what happened. It's a tragic time in history, people find the different investigations compelling, I loved the movie JFK, but in the end, we're all just spinning our wheels. See Four Days in November, have yourself a good cry, and watch these documentaries with a skepticism and detachment.

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