"Bobby" a 10+

Have just returned from seeing "Bobby" ... and it's been a shattering experience.

As I indicated in the previous note, in which I told of the awfulness of that night's breaking news in our New York ABC net studio and control room ... and how that great staff handled the event, being the only net operation that was still on the air from LA ... whereas the other two had already goodnighted their stations, and thus releasing their nets till morning, it being next-to-impossible to bring them back till then.

Anyway, seeing the film "Bobby" today, was devastating ... and at times I found it impossible to stop the tears and even an embarrassing sob. The younger people around me probably thought they were sitting near an antique moron.

The cast, heavily dominated by some of Hollywood's most powerful stars, none of them glamorized, was perfect .... and I won't bother to list them all.

"Bobby"'s producers, writers and director used a mix of studio sequences (to show the lives and personalities of some of the LA people at the Ambassador Hotel) skillfully mixing in TV, newsreel and Signal Corps/Vietnam footage ... so that it was unnecessary to have an actor portray Robert F. Kennedy, except in a few shots - including some of the devastating scenes in the Ambassador kitchen - in which you see only "his" legs and torso and one or two of the hotel arrival shots, in which we see only the back of "his" head.

At the end of the film, over shots of Vietnam, Washington and RFK's visits with kids, old people, street/campaign crowds, etc. ... we hear the senator make a powerful, powerful speech (or broadcast ?), in which he speaks of the need to really handle our social ills and shortcomings ... and at this point, even the laughing idiots, sitting near me in the (almost filled)theater, fell silent.

I urge you to see this film.

You'll thank me.

Gary Franklin

PS: The LA Times, in its "Weekend Calendar", capsule reviews of new and running films, today ran "Bobby", not with its "Critics' Choices" ... and not even under the "Also Recommended" ... but, instead, under "Also in Theaters", tries to demolish this powerful film (" ... writer-director Emilio Estevez has exceeded his reach .... a film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that ..... falls flat dramatically ....") - but this guy (or gal) apparently loves so much of the other new garbage, churned out by the Hollywood mills, and so beloved by the juvenile morons, busy groping each other in the theater darknesses.