Ruby

Sadly, MacKenzie's film about Jack Ruby will probably be viewed as an appendix to Oliver Stone's JFK, though it has merits in its own right. Particularly well caught is the easy-going and long-standing venality between strip-joint owner Ruby and the Dallas police, the CIA and the Mafia. Ruby is a bafflingly multi-faceted character, and Aiello pulls out all the stops in portraying the whole ingratiating, generous, sentimental, homicidal, paranoid mess. Perhaps the most startling depiction of Ruby's volatility occurs in Cuba when, forced against his wishes to carry out a hit, he suddenly turns the gun on the hirer. His relationship with stripper Candy Cane (Fenn) seems oddly avuncular, but then he may have been a non-practising homosexual. Writer Stephen Davis drafts Candy into JFK's bed, and plasters her with blood from the President's assassination in Dealey Plaza - without straining credulity. Veteran Marc Lawrence, as Santos Alicante, makes a chillingly believable mobster.