Crisis behind a presidential commitment
(DVD)

Originally broadcast as a television motion picture in 1963.

Full screen presentation; Dolby Digital stereo.

Special features: a documentary Faces of November (12 min.); optional audio commentary from Robert Drew and Richard Leacock.

Film makers, Richard Leacock, James Lipscomb, D.A. Pennebaker, Hope Ryden.

Narrator, James Lipscomb.

Having earned John F. Kennedy's trust with his 1960 campaign-trail film Primary, cinéma vérité documentarian Robert Drew expressed his desire to document a president in crisis. When African American college students Vivian Malone and James Hood prepared to enroll at the all-white University of Alabama in June 1963, governor George Wallace defied a federal court order and vowed to prevent the students' enrollment. Kennedy granted unprecedented access to Drew and his unobtrusive four-team crew, who used handheld cameras to cover both sides of the conflict: Wallace self-righteously clings to segregation, while a flurry of phone calls between the president, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenback reveal a tightly coordinated plan to dismiss Wallace (in Robert Kennedy's words) as "a second-rate figure." Drew's short film Faces of November provides an examination of the meaning of John F. Kennedy's death to those at his funeral.

DVD.