Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement was pretty much the watershed moment in Kennedy Conspiracy land. Up to that point, very few people had put the pieces together and then presented them in an easily digestible manner.The sad truth is that trying to diagram all the inconsistencies, contradictions, oversights (intentional and non) and outright lies in the Warren Commission Report could drive anyone either crazy or to sleep very quickly. And let's be honest, if you are a die-hard believer in the WC, I doubt this film will change your mind. But if you haven't committed one way or the other, and simply want a very concise, compelling, and scary-as-hell overview of why those "conspiracy nuts" are the way they are, you owe it to yourself to check it out --- if you care.The biggest minuses of Rush to Judgement are both it's budget (zero) and the neophyte directorial and production skills. There are times when you can swear you re watching a film strip in your 1977 Social Studies class...it really is *that* static.But what Lane's film lacks in style it more than makes up for in substance as well as incredibly convincing argumentation. Remember, Lane is a lawyer first and foremost: making convincing arguments is what he's good at. Digging up tons of eyewitnesses to the assassination is another.If you take away nothing from Rush to Judgement, I think you'll notice one very important detail that runs through nearly all interviewees in this documentary: they are SCARED ***tless! And they should be --- the majority featured here met strange, untimely, or unexplained fates very shortly after this film was released. You can practically see the fatal visions flashing in their pupils as they reluctantly at first, then sometimes eagerly spill their guts about what they REALLY BELIEVE HAPPENED. These are not people seeking attention or looking to get rich quick...you don't even have to get past the film's black and white credits to see that. But these people's stories are all remarkably similar. Mmmmmm.Why, you may ask are these people taking such a risk? Are they stupid? No. They simply CARE. They cared about their country and they saw that something was really, really wrong...and they wanted to do something about it. And some of them paid for that concern with their lives. Pretty awesome if you ask me. If *you* care, you owe it to yourself to see Lane's film as well. It's a very rare case where content trumps style hands down to create a classic.

Over the decades, there's been so much propaganda on both sides of the JFK assassination argument, that it could be off-putting to anybody, especially the novice.But the strength of RUSH TO JUDGMENT is it's timing, the period, coming just a couple of years after the assassination... True, as it was so early, not as much was known then--- but sometimes less is more; what you have here are just fresh, unpolished, unrehearsed, raw and chilling interviews with the witnesses at a time LONG before the whole topic had become the lost-in-time cliché it seems to now be.The quiet simplicity, lack of pretense, the (then) newness of the subject-matter, and the flavor of the era drive home this documentary's point more effectively and convincingly--- and hit a far more macabre note --- than any thunderous, drum-beating entry today could possibly achieve.

But unfortunately it did. The tragedy of the murder of our 35th Presdent lingers with us. We wallow in debt, and only 12% of America citizens approve of our Congress and their current work. We have ceased to have a government of the people and by the people as prescribed in our founding documents. Why? And to what end? John Kennedy was a courageous man who dared to go up against the "invisible" powers that be. His belief was that man made problems could have man made solutions, that his role as a leader was really to lead, and not to follow the dictates of those who pulled the strings behind the curtain. Three times he resisted the temptation to go to War- 1. Bay of Pigs- a small cadre of "resistance" fighters landing on the Bay of Pigs beach to lead an overthrow of Castro. CIA and military pushed him hard, but he did not commit our troops, planes or ships to engage Castro. 2. Berlin Wall- After WW2 Berlin was divided into East (under Communist control) and West (under Western influence). To stave off a lot of problems with defections and such the Communist leadership decided to seal off their part with the infamous Berlin Wall. Kennedy again came under a lot of pressure here to act in a military manner. One of his generals even put tanks right on the border, against what Kennedy ordered. Despite intense pressure he took the long view and resisted the call to arms. 3. Cuban Missile Crisis- When Castro took control he eventually ended up in alliance with the former USSR, who provided, among other things, weapons, including nuclear missiles. The missile launch sites were under construction when Kennedy learned of this and initiated a blockade, also called a quarantine, to stop shipment of missiles and offensive weapons. The military was trying their best to get him to invade, which he nearly did. 4. Vietnam- Kennedy told Walter Cronkite on CBS that it was "Their war" and they have to be the ones to win it. He had plans, and orders in place to begin removing troops at the end of 1963. So he made plans to get us out of a "Police action" we were already in. Almost all serious students of the assassination agree that Oswald did not pull the trigger that killed the President, and may not have fired at all that day. So why watch the movie? Because it takes you back to that time, talking to the people who were there. You can see them struggling at times to reconcile what they saw with the official version of events. You can also see the officials giving misleading statements. Some not really lies, just not the truth, and some flat out false. See it with your own eyes, and hear it with your ears. This movie remains, as has been previously indicated, one of the important ever filmed. Real people are involved, but so is the issue of the truth and who we are as a people. These folks are not profiting from this, and several look scared, but they talk anyway. Listen to what they say and it will frighten you and then make you angry. Angry that we have been fed lies for so long,and angry that we are now in two wars for which very few can tell us WHAT our objective is. Can you? I wonder if we can handle the truth. But open them we must if we are to survive and thrive as a free people.

I viewed Rush to Judgment when it came out in 1967. It was four years since the assassination and there wasn't a lot of information about the Dallas tragedy, except for what the government wanted its citizens to know. It would take decades to get to the level of knowledge we now have in the year 2006. In 1967, we didn't know that commission member Gerald Ford altered the location of JFK's back wound to a neck wound, thus facilitating the ridiculous single bullet theory.So when Mark Lane presented his movie, "Rush To Judgment," the information he provided in it was of tremendous importance to the JFK research community. We will always be indebted to the work and courage that Mark Lane showed in providing this most important and informative movie.