In honor of the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, we are showing this documentary by former Life magazine photographer Robert Drew, one of the early innovators of direct cinema, or cinema verité. He produced a series of intimate and at the time groundbreaking documentaries for ABC News on candidate and later President Kennedy, collectively known as The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates. With a future all-star team of filmmakers, including Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker, Adventures of the New Frontier gets up close and personal during the president’s first six weeks in office, starting with his inaugural speech, a limo dissection of it by economist John Kenneth Galbraith and author John Steinbeck, and members of the administration as the president tries to get his anti-poverty, pro-space exploration New Frontier on the move. — Doug Pullen
