13-05-2009, 10:15 PM
"He also taught himself Russian." Bet you never knew that!
* A fifty-minute long ‘docuplay’ broadcast on Tuesday, 15 March 1966, at 8 p.m., in BBC1’s Play of the Month series.
Quote:Radio Times, Vol. 170, No. 2209, 10 March 1966, p. 27
Lee Oswald - Assassin
By Rudolph Cartier
Tonight’s Play of the Month* tells the story of the man who killed President Kennedy and is introduced here by its director Rudolph Cartier.
Nine years ago this month, my wife and I stopped overnight in Terni, a small Italian town about 100 kilometres north of Rome. It was a dull place at the foot of the Abruzzi mountains with a lot of industrial buildings – among them a small arms factory. I could not guess at that time that its vast store of surplus weapons from the second world war contained a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, serial number 2766, built in 1940, which one day would fire the shots which would kill John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States.
Tonight’s play is about the man who fired these shots: Lee Harvey Oswald. It is based on Dallas – 22 November by the German author Felix Lutzkendorf. That work was written in the tradition of the modern German ‘documentaries’ like Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Joel Brand Story (a previous Play of the Month). Based on the Warren Report and other documentary evidence like Lee Oswald’s diary, Lutzkendorf’s play traced the life of the assassin from the time of his discharge from the U.S. Marines to the moment when he was killed by Jack Ruby.
After I had spent last summer translating Dallas – 22 November, I joined forces with Reed de Rouen, American actor and playwright, and together we re-wrote it, filling in the gaps with material from the Warren Report, and giving it its final narrative shape for the television screen and a new title.
Our play does not try to whitewash or blacken the perpetrator of the most monstrous deed of our century. Like the Warren Report on which it is based, it gives a precise and unbiased account of what made Oswald ‘tick.’ He grew up in poverty, spending his childhood in various orphanages because his widowed mother had to go to work to fend for her three children, and he soon nourished a profound hatred against authority and ‘the rich.’
Although he was later described as lazy, work-shy, and self-opinionated, one must also mention that he tried to improve his education by reading – Walt Whitman and George Orwell in particular. Animal Farm and 1984 were his favourites. He also taught himself Russian. The evidence of all witnesses points to the fact that Oswald, although only semi-literate, was not unintelligent.
No other event in the history of the world has been so fully documented as those two November days in Dallas. But as I did not intend to use any of the abundant newsreel material we had to stage and shoot our own ‘newsreels’ for the production – including the incredible scenes at the Dallas Police H.Q., where the hordes of reporters, photographers, television and film cameramen behaved like savages.
Our main problem was the casting of the title-role. The actor had to be an American speaking with the Southern drawl (which Oswald never lost), and somebody who was capable of portraying his schizophrenic mixture of sullen resentment and boyish charm.
I had heard of a new young actor working in Hollywood, and remembered having seen him play Frank Sinatra’s kid-brother in Come Blow Your Horn. But I had to see him first in a dramatic role, and sent for a television film – in which he played a pathological killer – made in New York last year. When the producer of tonight’s play, Peter Luke, and I emerged from the projection theatre, we knew we had found our Oswald in Tony Bill. Not only is he of the same age, height, and build, but he is also, like Oswald, a family man with a young wife and two small children.
* A fifty-minute long ‘docuplay’ broadcast on Tuesday, 15 March 1966, at 8 p.m., in BBC1’s Play of the Month series.