Entertainment

A HIT AND A MISTRESS

NOW it can be told: John F. Kennedy would have sur vived Dallas if only his mistress had been able to reach him on the phone.

In “An American Affair” – “JFK” meets “The Reader” – Gretchen Mol plays the girlfriend, an artist in 1963 Georgetown who strikes up a flirtatious friendship with a 13-year-old schoolboy (Cameron Bright) across the street. Meanwhile, she is being stalked by two CIA men, one of them her ex, both of whom are trying to get an urgent message to the president that he’s in danger.

The boy has nothing to do with any of this, and although he is our conduit in the story we never come to know much about him except that he’d like to snuggle up with the Mol character. Who wouldn’t?

Even Oliver Stone would giggle at the notion that the CIA couldn’t reach JFK through any means except via one of his blond playmates.

Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, drug use). At the Village East, Second Avenue and 12th Street.