JFK at 30: Is Oliver Stone a crackpot or a prophet?

With Stone presenting his new Kennedy documentary in Cannes next week, Geoffrey Macnab looks back on the director’s 1991 film about the assassination and how his conspiracy theories are regarded today

Kevin Costner on the set of ‘JFK’ with Oliver Stone, who was both praised and ridiculed when the film came out (Snap/Shutterstock)

Artists have their obsessions. Paul Cézanne painted the same mountain again and again. Edgar Degas had his fetish for young female ballet dancers. And Oliver Stone can’t help making films about the assassination of President John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

It’s 30 years now since Stone’s epic JFK, in which crusading New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) rejects the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a lone gunman was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. Instead, Garrison goes after a shady businessman, Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), who he believes was involved in a complex murder conspiracy.

Stone was both praised and ridiculed when JFK came out. The film was called “a basket case for conspiracy”. Revered newscaster Walter Cronkite described it as “a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies”. The prevailing view was that this was a tour de force in cinematic terms – it won Oscars for cinematography and editing – but deeply unreliable as history.