I...for Icarus (Henri Verneuil, 1979)

 

The opening moments of Henri Verneuil’s I…for Icarus could hardly be more explicit about the film’s desire to tap into the facts and myths of the JFK assassination: would-be assassin Daslow (check out that anagram!) raises his rifle to take aim at the presidential motorcade below, finding that his gun cartridge is empty; the president is shot dead by an unseen other and then so is Daslow, in what’s staged as a suicide. A year or so later an investigative commission names him as the sole killer, over the dissent of a single member, Yves Montand’s Attorney General Volney, who then launches his own much more energetic inquiry. The film undermines itself with leaden writing and plotting: characters speak at rather than to each other (even the great Montand, to most viewers likely the only recognizable person in the cast, seldom surpasses the strictly functional) and the Volney inquiry proceeds so easily and quickly that it’s impossible to imagine how the original commission filled its time (even allowing that it was a put-up job), often progressing through hokey devices such as a key witness revealed as a liar because a photograph indicates he wasn’t wearing his glasses and so couldn’t have seen what he claimed to see, or a tape which for some unfathomable reason contains a helpful montage of commands issued in connection with the assassination and other misdeeds. The would-be shock ending is telegraphed so far in advance that one merely grows impatient at the film’s failure to pull the trigger (uh, so to speak) and get it done. For all of that, it’s never dull of course, well in line with latter-day conspiratorial attitudes, suggesting a “deep state” of almost limitless reach and awareness, and taking an extended detour into a psychological experiment about submission to authority which almost constitutes a self-contained film within the film.