Scene 1: A Grassy Knoll

On the clear November day in Dallas when Abraham Zapruder decided to take his camera to town, the young Brian De Palma was stepping out on his first date with Jill Clayburgh, then a budding actress and student at Sarah Lawrence College. “We were walking through Bronxville [N.Y.] and saw news of the assassination on a television screen in a store window,” De Palma recalls. John F. Kennedy had been shot.

The news didn’t just put a damper on the date; it had a profound effect on the young filmmaker. Just as Kennedy’s murder reverberated through the culture, altering a nation’s consciousness and its history, the horror of that day and the air of uncertainty it spawned stamped itself on De Palma’s art.

It can be seen in “Greetings,” a 1968 film in which a young man is so obsessed with the murder that he scours blown-up photographs of the grassy knoll for a second gunman and spends his time on a date tracing bullet trajectories on a young woman’s body.

It is there in “Blow Out,” the 1981 film in which a movie sound technician played by John Travolta accidentally records a politician’s death. He spends the rest of the movie examining tapes and photos of the “accident” to uncover a conspiracy.

And it is there in “Snake Eyes,” De Palma’s latest film, opening Friday, in which the U.S. Secretary of defense is assassinated at a public event. It is up to Nicolas Cage, as a morally challenged police detective, to find the killer, working alongside his friend, played by Gary Sinise, a ramrod-straight naval commander in charge of security.

De Palma deconstructs the events leading up to his fictional shooting from several points of view, in much the way that sleuths have pored over the Zapruder film for 35 years looking for clues.

“The Kennedy assassination was the most investigated murder case, probably, in the history of mankind,” says the 57-year-old filmmaker. “But the more you investigate, the more murk you come up with. It’s like the Zapruder film. The more you blow it up looking for hidden details, the harder it becomes to make out the picture.”

With this film, De Palma is treading--however lightly--into territory already well-charted by John Frankenheimer, who directed the political thrillers “Seven Days in May” and “The Manchurian Candidate” in the 1960s.

“Snake Eyes,” like most of De Palma’s work, does not seem deeply concerned with politics. But as in a number of other movies now in theaters or soon to be released, a profound distrust of authority lies at its core. Not only can government officials not be trusted to do the right thing in these movies, more often than not they are the ones lurking in the shadows, waiting to plunge the dagger. Governmental distrust in movies isn’t confined to political films like “Wag the Dog” and “Bulworth” or “JFK,” Oliver Stone’s 1991 fictional take on the assassination. Cynicism and fear of the people in power have become a staple of action films and thrillers.

De Palma and others trace it back to that day in Dallas. “The Kennedy assassination was the first time that we didn’t believe our leaders,” De Palma told an interviewer in 1994. “That started [the distrust], and Vietnam finished it off.”

“Snake Eyes” does not deal directly with the Kennedy murder; rather, in this action thriller, the assassination has passed into metaphor. As in “Blow Out,” De Palma here uses a political murder to address a favorite theme--the nature of reality and the search for truth in a world in which right and wrong, fact and fiction, increasingly are seen as relative.

Among other films that take a similar jaded view is “The X-Files,” the movie based on the television series about the search for extraterrestrials, which almost drips with paranoia and distrust.

Then there is the upcoming “Enemy of the State,” to be released in November. Directed by Tony Scott and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the action film stars Will Smith as a lawyer framed for a high-level government murder and put under surveillance by a corrupt intelligence official.

Among recent releases are “Absolute Power,” the Clint Eastwood movie in which the president covers up the murder of his illicit lover, and “Mercury Rising,” in which government agents seek to kill an autistic child who cracked a secret code. After the boy’s parents are killed, an FBI agent portrayed by Bruce Willis helps him and is pursued by government assassins.

The argument also could be made that “The Truman Show” traffics in similar fears of an out-of-control authority imposing its will without regard for individual lives or rights. Although the film features no assassins and the government is not the culprit, Jim Carrey portrays a man who learns that his life has been prescribed by a god-like figure and watched as entertainment by millions.

“People have become much more cynical,” says Frankenheimer, whose work has often dealt with the misuse of power. “With the political examples that are continually before us, you can’t help but be cynical. I’m not sure this is a good thing, but nevertheless it is a much less innocent time than it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s. . . . I date the loss of innocence to the death of JFK.”

Frankenheimer’s next film falls within the cinema of cynicism rubric. “Ronin,” set to be released in October, involves former CIA agents (played by Robert De Niro, Jean Reno and Stellan Skarsgard) brought together to recover a mysterious briefcase. The men strive for it amid double-crosses and growing paranoia, yet have no idea what the case contains or which government wants it. Frankenheimer wants to protect the secret of the film, but it is safe to say that the mystery involves the CIA, FBI and KGB.

The movie he is set to begin work on next, “The Good Shepherd,” deals with similar themes.

“There is political paranoia [in the country] and a high degree of political cynicism,” says Curtis Gans, executive director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonprofit Washington-based group that studies levels of voter participation. He blames the trend, which he calls disturbing, for the steady decline in voting levels.

“Paranoia is dangerous,” he says. “Paranoia leads you to Oklahoma City,” referring to the 1995 bombing.

Like the filmmakers, this ex-reporter, who covered the Kennedy assassination for United Press International, traces it to what he calls widespread disbelief in the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

“That was the first period that people began to think that you can’t accept things really at face value,” Gans said. “In addition to that, there as the war in Vietnam and Johnson’s [being] disingenuous with the American people. And I think Nixon helped to promote [the distrust]. It was the peculiar juxtaposition of Johnson and Nixon that has led us to doubt the words of our leaders ever since.”

On the surface, “Snake Eyes” appears to be a simple thriller with a twist--the Rashomon-like device of viewing the crime from multiple perspectives. But there are enough tiny autobiographical touches and recurring De Palma themes to suggest that the film, unlike some of his other recent work, comes straight from the filmmaker’s paranoid heart.

For the longest time after Kennedy’s death, De Palma was convinced there was a conspiracy. “That was me in ‘Greetings,’ ” says the director. “I read all the books. I knew about bullet No. 399 [the so-called magic bullet said to have passed through the bodies of both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally and emerged in near pristine condition]. I was tracing bullet paths, trying to figure out why did the bullet do this, why did it go that way?”

Then he read “one book too many”--a tome speculating that Kennedy’s body was tampered with so that the paths of the bullets were reversed. He saw then how absurd the theorizing had become. The photograph had been enlarged too many times, the truth was becoming too hard to distinguish.

The screenplay for “Snake Eyes” was written by David Koepp, the writer of “Jurassic Park,” who previously worked with De Palma on “Mission: Impossible” and “Carlito’s Way.” The script is based on a story Koepp and De Palma developed together.

“Ironically enough, [Koepp] was the one who recommended doing the murder from three different points of view,” De Palma says. But it was the director’s idea to make the military-industrial complex an element in the film and to stage the murder in a casino.

Almost every scene of the film is set within the casino. This is because casinos, in De Palma’s view, are the epitome of falsehood--a made-up world that deliberately shuts out reality, a place where everyone is happy and drinks are free. “The casino industry doesn’t even call it gambling,” he says with a laugh. “It’s gaming. Gaming? How about robbing?”

This launches De Palma on a rant that veers from big business to politics to an indictment of the news media. Referring to the tobacco executives who insisted for decades that nicotine was not addictive--even going before Congress to swear to it under oath--De Palma harrumphs, “You can’t get more cynical than that. . . .

“There are no absolutes anymore--everything is relative,” he grumbles. “On television news there’re no facts nowadays. There’s no truth. It’s just views. I always thought reporters were supposed to go out and find what happened--who, what, when, where and how.

“I believe basically that there is an absolute truth to what happens,” he says. “There is a right and a wrong. It’s not relative.”

The search for “what happened” and the moral imperative to do right are what the film is about.

Of all of the young hot-shot directors to make a splash in the 1970s, De Palma was the hardest to figure out. Unlike Martin Scorsese, who drew inspiration from his own Little Italy upbringing, or Francis Ford Coppola, who tackled big themes, De Palma didn’t seem to have anything in particular to say. Either that, or else the way he said it (with so much bravado or maybe just with so much blood) overwhelmed whatever meaning might have lain beneath all that stereophonic sound and fury.

Like Hitchcock, a director he idolizes and for many years imitated, De Palma’s stock in trade is the concoction of film entertainments that viewers may, and usually do, accept on face value as simply thrillers infused with quirky, sardonic humor.

Once we get past the violence, what we remember most from De Palma’s films are tour de force examples of pure cinema: the baby carriage scene in “The Untouchables” or the stunning, almost wordless, 10-minute sequence in “Dressed to Kill” in which Angie Dickinson plays cat and mouse in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an admirer. We don’t remember ideas. Who can say what “Dressed to Kill” or “Carrie” are really about?

The young De Palma was looked up to by his filmmaking peers as an intellectual and serious thinker. But he made a name for himself in the 1970s and 1980s by riffing on Hitchcock and killing off women in ever more gruesome ways.

“I learned very early we [filmmakers] really didn’t have much effect” on society, says the director. “I was on a talk show once talking about the coming revolution, and they were selling aspirin during the commercial break.” He guffaws loudly. “The revolution became a product. Once you turn something into an ad, it’s not a revolution.”

And so his films earned the reputation of being primarily about other movies. “Dressed to Kill” was a variation and elaboration of Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” “Obsession” a reworking of “Vertigo.” “Blow Out,” for all of the self-reflexiveness of its design and its commentary on the nature of De Palma’s art, owed much both to Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” and Coppola’s “The Conversation.”

He says it was “a learning process” as well as a way of paying homage. The key question, he says, is whether his own work is only a pale imitation or adds something of value.

In conversation, he reveals himself to be a director whose films more often than not spring from deeply felt convictions. In fact, he views the plots as structures to contain (and make digestible) the ideas that lie at his movies’ core.

“The problem with dealing with material like this is how to find a narrative that lets people connect with it,” he says. “People don’t see the world before their eyes until it’s put into a narrative mode.”

De Palma’s plots have tended toward the sensational, but recurring ideas can be seen in his more personal films. Among them are elements of voyeurism, technology and conspiracy and such themes as the difficulty of making moral judgments or finding out the truth.

Voyeurism figures in “Snake Eyes” in a big way. Almost the entire casino is watched by surveillance cameras--in trying to unravel the conspiracy, Cage in essence has the help of hundreds of Zapruder films.

De Palma’s assassins have similar motivation and mouth the same pieties as the conspirators in “Seven Days in May,” Frankenheimer’s 1964 film about a plot by the military-industrial complex to take over. Also, De Palma’s longtime use of split screens and television monitors have an antecedent in Frankenheimer’s work, with its abundant use of TV screens.

Perhaps more than any stylistic similarities or shared visual motifs, however, it is the Kennedy assassination that links these two otherwise disparate filmmakers.

Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” may still be the best example of the cynical cinematic age it so boldly heralded. The film managed both to attack (from a safe distance) the excesses of 1950s McCarthyism while at the same time presaging the cynicism and distrust that took hold after Kennedy’s death. “Little did we realize how prophetic that film would be,” Frankenheimer said of the movie, which ended with the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. Kennedy was killed the following year.

Like De Palma, Frankenheimer found that his life and art also were profoundly affected by a Kennedy murder, but in his case it was Robert Kennedy’s.

After John Kennedy’s assassination, the truth of which Frankenheimer believes is still not known, he became close friends with Bobby. On the June night in 1968 when Kennedy was shot down at the Ambassador Hotel while running for president, Frankenheimer was waiting outside to drive him home to watch the primary returns.

“I fell into a deep, deep, deep depression after that,” he says. “I did not do anything political for years and years.” For a long time, he said, he found nothing he wanted to commit to, either politically or professionally.

De Palma’s exposure to the trauma of that era was less personal, transmitted via his TV screen, but he says, “I couldn’t help but be effected by Kennedy’s assassination. And Bobby Kennedy’s death too--I was up watching the election returns at 2 or 3 in the morning on the East Coast when news of Bobby’s assassination came on the air. Martin Luther King . . .

“You go through that decade. . . .” His voice trails off. “It was wild. . . .”