On October 19, 1963 LHO reportedly watched two movies about assassinations. Here is a snip from “Marina and Lee” by Priscilla McMillan:
Every now and then after that she felt him sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited. She had very little idea what he was watching.
Lee saw two movies that night, both of them saturated in violence. One was Suddenly (1954), starring Frank Sinatra, which is about a plot to kill the president of the United States. In the film Sinatra, a mentally unbalanced ex-serviceman who has been hired to do the job, drives into a small Western town where the president is due to arrive by train, debark, and get into a car that will drive him into the High Sierras for some mountain fishing. Sinatra finds a house overlooking the railroad station and seizes it, subduing its occupants. He leans out of a window and gets the railroad tracks into the crosshairs of his rifle sight. He waits and waits; finally, the train comes into view. But it chugs through town without stopping, and in the end Sinatra is killed.
Marina dozed through the first movie, and the one that followed—We Were Strangers (1949). This, too, was about assassination. Based on the actual overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in Cuba in 1933, the movie stars John Garfield as an American who has come to help the cause of revolution. He and a tiny band of cohorts plot to blow up the whole cabinet, including the president, at a single stroke. The plot fails and Garfield dies, but the people rise up in small groups all over Cuba and overthrow the dictatorship.
The movie “Suddenly” was broadcast recently and I was able to record it. Yesterday I watched it and was impressed with the acting of Frank Sinatra. The title of this thread is a line (paraphrased) from that movie. If I remember correctly, there is a YouTube video available for anyone who might want to watch it.