Executive Action

Interesting and effective film about the JFK assassination released ten years after the tragic event and seventeen years before the far more popular movie "JFK". With hardly any of the controversy of the Oliver Stone & Kevin Costner version.

A number of big oil-men get together in June 1963 to plan to assassinate JFK because his policies, domestic as well as foreign, are a threat to their money and power. The oil men start to put into effect the plan that eventually led to the tragic events of November 22, 1963. Good acting and directing makes this movie grab your attention and see it through it's tragic ending. Even though everyone watching the movie knows what the ending is which is anticlimactic.

What really makes the movie is the build-up and plans that lead to the events that happened in Dallas on that fateful November day. One of the most chilling scenes in the movie is when Farrington, Burt Lancaster, meets up in a diner with Operations Chief played by actor Ed Lauter. Farrington explains to him what he'll get for the "hit" in money and expenses without telling him who is to be "hit". Lauter realizes who it is without Farrington even telling him just by the money and effort involved and tells him surprisingly as well as shockingly "You've just told me who's going to get to hit!": Which is the President of the United State John Fitzgerald Kennedy without even once mentioning him!

Also very effective, besides the scene when the actual assassination takes place, is how the killers planned the "hit" and how they came to the conclusion, after hours and hours of practice shooting on a moving and difficult target, that one shooter doing it would be impossible. The killers instead opted to use at least three riflemen in different places. Unlike the version what we got from the official report by the by now totally discredited, by almost 90% of the American public, Warren Commission of a one man one gun assassin. "Executive Action" was also Robert Ryans last major role.

Entertaining and interesting film which puts forward a seemingly plausible theory as to why JFK was assassinated.

The main thought seems to be that President Kennedy's ideas in regard to nuclear disarmament, racial equality and ensuring a square deal for America's most lowly paid workers were just too radical as far as the country's hard line conservatives were concerned.

Appears to have been generally well researched and non sensationalist.

However, it's a fair criticism to note that some of the finer points of period detail are slightly shaky. For example, some of the hairstyles and fashions definitely belong to the '70s rather than the early '60s. We have a '61 Chevy coupe with a tattered rear back seat which has obviously been parched by a decade of sun exposure. But these are minor points.

Don't worry too much about nit picking as this movie is most certainly well worth a look.

Released in November 1973, near the tenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, EXECUTIVE ACTION is often overlooked as a film because of Oliver Stone's extraordinarily controversial 1991 film JFK. It obviously doesn't have the high-budget gloss or the montage that Stone's film does, but what it does have is a hard-hitting inside look into the individuals who might have had a direct hand in plotting this hideous crime.

Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan (in one of his final movies), and Will Geer are the conspirators, right-wing businessmen with an axe to grind. As in Stone's film, the motivations for the assassination are disgust with the way Kennedy handled Fidel Castro and the possibility that he would have stopped our involvement in Vietnam before it ever got to the ground troop stage. Based on Mark Lane's book "Rush To Judgement", scripted by former blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and directed by David Miller (LONELY ARE THE BRAVE), EXECUTIVE ACTION is very somber and cold-blooded, but superbly constructed. It is amazing to think that three actors with ultra-liberal political credentials like Lancaster, Ryan, and Geer should be so icily convincing in their portrayals of fascists. The film makes very plausible the banality of evil. And like JFK, it also blows holes in the Warren Commission report big enough to drive a truck through and make apologists like Gerald Posner apoplectic.

Whether seen on its own terms or as a companion piece to the much better known JFK, EXECUTIVE ACTION is worth viewing--and, like Stone's film, asks us to consider the nightmarish chain of events that seem to have resulted directly or indirectly from what happened on that dark day in Dallas in 1963.

I forgot about this movie until I saw it on tape in a cut-out bin. I don't know why it isn't a well-known film, it's very good. The cast is excellent, and the straight-forward tone is unique. There's no judgement provided by the movie makers on the plotters, who are on one hand presented as earnest men doing what they believed to be in the best interest of the country, and on the other as lunatic facists, discussing eliminating "excess population" as if it were an everyday thing.

The purpose of the movie is to educate, it seems, presenting a lot of facts or what are presented to be facts, about Oswald as a patsy. I've read enough to know that not all of what is presented as factual is true (the phone system being cut out in D.C. is a well-known canard, repeated in "JFK"), but the movie uses this approach to lay out a very logical scenario regarding how it could have been done. The political background, and the details of the lapses of the Secret Service are used to good effect.

Finally, there is the presence of JFK himself as a counterpoint throughout the movie. Films of some of his best lines combined with the haunting musical score lend an air of melancholy appropriate to the subject matter, a feeling that is shared by the plotters. There is a quote from Shakespeare given by Robert Ryan that sums it up; ". . . and nothing can we call our own but death . . . let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." It's one fine moment of many in a well-crafted film.

David Miller's conspiracy-theory 're-enactment' shows the plotting by several oil-barons and intelligence officers to murder the then- President of the United States John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's pushing of the Civil Rights movement and plans to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam proves a threat to these emotionless rich folk, and the removal of Kennedy will benefit their business and, to them, their country. Farrington (Burt Lancaster), a black ops specialist, plans out the assassination in minute detail, with the backing of Foster (Robert Ryan), an oil baron. The action cuts between meetings between these men, the preparations of the gunmen and their target practice, and the recruitment and actions of a Lee Harvey Oswald lookalike.

While not being a fact-based and detailed account like the portrayal of Jim Garrison's investigation in Oliver Stone's excellent JFK (1991), Executive Action makes no claims to be historical fact, but instead a theory of how Kennedy's assassination could have been planned. How much is based on fact I don't know, as I had trouble finding much information about it. While it is certainly very interesting from a conspiracy- theorists point-of-view, the film works far better as a straightforward thriller, and certainly manages to build up plenty of tension regardless of the fact that we know what is going to happen, and that what is being played out in front of us is unlikely to be true.

It's a cold and emotionless film, which made me like it more. Lancaster's Farrington prepares the assassination as if he is preparing a holiday - matter-of-factly, routinely. The terrifying thing is that these men believe that what they are doing is patriotic and for the good of the country. Because of this, the film can be seen as a damning commentary of American values - the pursuit of money and desire for security is held in higher regard than doing the right thing, or equality. The film's low budget is certainly noticeable, and some of the supporting acting is often questionable, but this is a riveting thriller that contains many qualities that made the 70's the greatest era for American cinema.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com