Point of Disorder

Rush to Judgment. It would appear difficult to make a dull film about John Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath. Difficult, but not impossible. Mark Lane has done it.

Lane presented his case for Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence last year, in the bestselling book Rush to Judgment. Though one-sided and full of obvious flaws, the book had a certain coherence and raised disturbing doubts in the minds of many readers. Possibly because pictures are harder to edit than words, the film version nakedly exposes the fragility of Lane's theorizing. Directed by Emile de Antonio, who made an effective movie about the McCarthy hearings, Point of Order, it purports to be a documentary. Actually, it is one long point of disorder--a poorly edited melange of Lane's interviews with men and women peripherally involved in the events of the four black days in Dallas. One such witness, for example, is Joseph W. Johnstone Jr., a pianist at Jack Ruby's nightclub.

Obsessively seeking to discredit the findings of the Warren Commission, Lane reaches into a mixed bag of legal tricks. He demands conclusions from a witness. "Do you think it's rather curious that . . . you were not called by the commission?" He asks leading questions: "Who mutilated the picture after it was in the commission's hands?"

And his film includes unprovable allusions to unexhibited evidence: "There are at least eight persons now dead, either from murder or at least strange deaths, who were closely related to Jack Ruby or Lee Harvey Oswald . . . Something is wrong in the land."

As counsel for the defense, Lane should never have gone to the jury--in this case the moviegoing public--with such a shaky case. He appears to be under the impression that Rush to Judgment rips the hide off America to expose the corruption beneath. But it only exposes the dry rot of his own unreasonable arguments.

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