Four Days In November (1964)

Strong and Moving!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

When you have to document one of the emotional events in the history of the 20th Century, you come here to this one film. United Press International got together with several other sources to cement what has now become the Case Closed legend of the shooting of JFK.The footage here of JFK's last appearances and of the funeral with Jackie and Bobby are really very well put together. Richard Basehart, (Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea on television) is a solid person for narrating this one. There are a lot of facts presented here in a logical fashion which document an event that is finally starting to fade from America's scene this many years later.There is some surprising footage in this account but nothing that would be controversial at all. A lot of footage of the fateful landing at Love Field and the procession to JFK's fate has those of us who remember this day still emotional.More people cried and more people were saddened by this event because of the fact that there we 3 TV Networks who basically for all the days through the funeral broadcast nothing else really dominated television like no other event in history. The live murder of Oswald on TV is here, Osswald's Funeral, even some trace outline of Ruby's Kit Kat Club in Dallas make the cut. Without a doubt, this films proves this is perhaps the most documented event in US History, it even out did Lincoln's shooting which has a huge amount of history documented in the 19th Century. As this event fades into History, and the last sealed records are opened, it is far too late to ever get a better version of this event than this film presents.

Archival footage is used to recount the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It follows Kennedy before arriving in Dallas as well as following Lee Harvey Oswald's footsteps. There is a small section for the actual shooting in the middle and then the aftermath dominates the second half. It's a very traditional documentary. There is a wall-to-wall old guy narration. It's timely released a year after the assassination. It got nominated for the Oscar. Its traditional newsreel style never really breaks and it follows the story mostly chronologically. The most compelling is probably hearing from Oswald himself and the foreboding description of his life. Basically, it's the standard documentary to encapsulate the event.

Four Days in November (1964) *** (out of 4) Oscar-nominated documentary taking a look at the four days in November where the country changed forever. I've watch dozens of documentaries on Kennedy and several just this past week on the 50th Anniversary of the president's assassination. I was rather late coming to see this popular film and even though I've seen quite a few there was still countless bits of footage that I had never seen before. I think what really makes this documentary stand apart is that it was made less than a year after the assassination so needless to say there's all sorts of footage that just typically doesn't get shown today. I think some of the most interesting moments deal with the moments right after the assassination when people were just hanging on to see whether or not the president was going to survive his wounds. The aftermath of course is another thing and it's interesting to note that hints of a conspiracy theory on displayed here and a couple of them would later be used in Oliver Stone's JFK. There's no doubt that history buffs will want to check this thing out because there's simply so much news footage that you really get a great idea of what it was like, television wise, when this happened. I will say that the film feels a tad bit long when watched today and it's also a bit too dry and at times lingers on. Still, there's no question that all the news footage makes this one worth checking out.

The title of this essay above is an apt description for the film FOUR DAYS IN November. For this film was a chronicle of four of the darkest days in American history.And those four days were between November 23-26, 1963 which started on the 23rd at 12:30 PM, Dallas Time when President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dealey Plaza as his motorcade approached the Texas School Book Depository and ended with the burial of President Kennedy on the 26th. And in between those events, we see history rapidly unfolding. First the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit by Lee Harvey Oswald; his eventual capture in a movie theater; and his eventual murder at the hands of Jack Ruby two days later. During that time, we also see the hastily arranged inauguration of President Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One; the preparations for the funeral of the slain President; and the day of the funeral which ended with President Kennedy's final journey to Arlington Cemetery for burial and the lighting of an Eternal Flame by his widow. All the while, we see the reactions to the events from a stunned America and a stunned world.By using news footage from both local and international sources, director Mel Stuart made a documentary that is still as compelling today as it was back in 1964. Even watching it half a century after the events, one can still feel the immediacy of those turbulent four days and still feel the sense of loss and shock that occurred on that fall day in Dallas. Shocks that still reverberate to this day, even to those who weren't born until after those Four Days in November.