Ethel

I'm not sure that Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel really deserves the biographical treatment she gets here which might explain why the director and principal interviewer here is her own daughter Rory. The film focuses almost entirely on her relationship with her assassinated husband, giving just a few scant minutes to her life after his death in 1968. There's no question about her depth of feeling for him, after all they had eleven children together and all the surviving children (sadly, two of them have pre-deceased her at young ages) chime in with their memories of their parents.

Containing rare footage of their family at play as well as clips of Robert and Ethel's side-by-side career in public life, the film employed a traditional back-to-front approach to tell its story in order. With Ethel cast as the little woman behind her man, her task it appears was to run their household, bring up their children and support her man on his various campaign trails.

As you might imagine from the home-made aspect of the film, there's not a lot of criticism or investigative questioning of the lives and careers of the Kennedys senior. Admittedly it was impossible to ignore Robert's early support for Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt as well as his admitting to initially supporting the war in Vietnam, but RFK always seemed big enough to admit his mistakes and more than most politicians, play his audiences straight. Maybe that's why it's sometimes said his death affected subsequent American history even more than his brother's. The film is similarly adulatory about his big brother Jack, but again there's no mention of JFK's philandering, or the Bay of Pigs fiasco to name but two and wasn't Bobby rumoured to be a lover of Marilyn Monroe too?

The malign influence of J Edgar Hoover barely gets mentioned and likewise other important figures of the time like LBJ, Martin Luther King and Jackie Kennedy are only fleetingly mentioned. I must admit too I cringed at all and sundry referring to their parents as "Mummy" and "Daddy" throughout.

Still alive as I write, the lady is wearing well and it's noticeable she never remarried, unlike Jackie. Overall, she appears to have been a good wife and mother, although other than her relationship to her sadly gone-too-soon husband, I think it's pushing it a little to justify a 90 minute tribute like this in her honour.