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.
