I was always a big fan of the "Sunn Classic" documentaries as a kid and was delighted that they are all posted on YouTube. Yes, they are dated, cheesy and even laughable today but still enjoyable. I particularly liked The Mysterious Monsters the one they did on Bigfoot and Beyond and Back and Beyond Deaths Door which were about near-death experiences. However, there was one "lost" Sunn classic film and this is it. It got nary a release in 1981 probably because of the attempted assassination of President Reagan. Next to London After Midnight and the King Kong "spider pit" scene this should go down as the most famous lost film of all time. However, James Conway the director was kind enough to send me a video of it on line recently and The President Must Die is a very enjoyable documentary about the Kennedy assassination and the various theories about who was involved even though its over forty years old and the technology was primitive back then it still holds up very well. Brad Crandall, who narrated many of the other Sunn films, is on hand here to take us through that terrible day and who might have been responsible. The movie opens with Kennedy's inauguration and then moves onto the grim procession of his funeral as the credits play. There is a touching tribute to Kennedy as we are reminded the Kennedy years were years of youth with a promise of a future filled with hope. Narrator Crandall then takes us through a straightforward "Dragnet" style narrative of Kennedys arrival in Dallas and the murder followed by Oswald's arrest and his murder by Jack Ruby. An interesting footnote about this film is that it is the first to feature the infamous Zapruder footage showing the assassination in all its horror. The movie details the farce of the Warren Commission and what a bunch of lies its report was. I for one consider it an insult to my intelligence for the Warren Commission to ask me to believe their ridiculous single bullet theory that one shot made two holes in Kennedy and Connally and came out intact and also it would have had to have stopped twice and turned in midair! No wonder they call it the magic bullet. This movie covers all of the theories about who could have been involved from the Cubans to the Russians to organized crime but the sad thing is we will never know the truth behind President Kennedy's murder.
Review of The President Must Die
