Behind the scenes of JFK's assassination

The assassination of President John F Kennedy, in 1963, was one of those momentous events that everyone who witnessed it, or watched the coverage on television, will remember for the rest of their lives.
In terms of modern day event-changing incidents, it ranks with 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami as a catastrophe that remains fixed in the mind with the unwritten caption “On that day, everything changed forever”.
I was a teenager alone in my parent’s sitting room in Southend, Essex, and my first petrified thought was: “Please God, don’t let them start a war over this.”
People who didn’t live through the 1960s can be excused for having no idea how fearful everyone was that the two superpowers, with sufficient nuclear warheads to destroy the Earth 10 times over, would, by design or accident, end everything.
It is also possible that people born after 1963 cannot get a true flavour of just how charismatic Kennedy was. If anyone knew about the serial philandering, they didn’t care, because he was the young hope of the world, a bringer of dreams to a world just emerging from the dull cloud of post war austerity.
So his assassination in Dallas was a thunderclap that affected us all, especially the handful of people intimately involved in the events of that day – a young doctor faced with trying to save the life of the most powerful man in the world; a first generation Jewish refugee making a new life for himself; another young man coming to realise that his own brother was the man who had shot the President.
Parkland, directed by award-winning journalist, writer and producer Peter Landesman, tells the story of these peripheral characters, whose actions provided the colour of a mainly black and white day. The title comes from the Parkland Memorial Hospital, to which the fatally wounded Kennedy was rushed after the shooting.
Unlike other movies of that day, this is a subdued, near documentary retelling of how the President, with his beautiful wife Jackie, went to Texas on a fence-mending tour, having seriously annoyed local political opponents in the preceding months.
Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), successful clothing manufacturer and fervent supporter of the country that gave his family refuge, went out to take an 8mm film of the motorcade and so recorded history for us all. Traumatised by the event and the mayhem afterwards, he was never the same man again.
Young resident doctor at Parkland, Charles Carrico (Zac Efron), was aghast at trying to save the President, when it was obvious to all that he was fatally injured. He recovered from the ordeal and went on to become a highly successful and skilled trauma doctor.
Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale), brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, despite the immense pressure to do otherwise, stuck by his delusional brother and equally dotty mother, and continues to live and work in Dallas to this day.
This is hardly a film to arouse excitement. It lacks, or merely avoids, some of the more obvious dramatic ploys of other films. It simply tells more of the story of the death of a president at the hands of one of his own people, in the land of the free.