"Executive Action" is a movie which purports to offer a solution to a real-life mystery; similar examples include "Zodiac", about a San Francisco serial killer, "From Hell" about "Jack the Ripper" and "Agatha", about the brief disappearance of writer Agatha Christie in 1926 (a mystery so banal that I cannot imagine why anyone thought it worthwhile making a film about it more than fifty years later).
Like Oliver Stone's JFK from 1991, "Executive Action" deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and (unsurprisingly) portrays the assassination as a conspiracy. (What would be a surprise would be if any film were ever to suggest that the assassination was carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone). The idea that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy is, of course, a popular one, but the conspiracy theorists seem unable to agree who the conspirators actually were. There are a vast number of conspiracy theories out there, according to which JFK was gunned down by, or on the orders of, among others, the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Ku Klux Klan, Vice-President Johnson, partisans of the murdered South Vietnamese President Diem or fanatical devotees of Marilyn Monroe, determined to avenge the death of their heroine at the hands of one of Kennedy's hit squads.
That last theory was invented by the British satirist Auberon Waugh with his tongue firmly in his cheek; he even claimed to have been a prominent member of the Avenge Marilyn Committee himself. The others, however, are all taken seriously, at least by those who propose them. Given that the script for "Executive Action" was written by that old Communist Dalton Trumbo, it is hardly surprising that it attempts to place the blame with the political Right. The actual identity of the conspirators remains rather shadowy, but they are presumably prominent industrialists, right-wing politicians and figures from the US intelligence community.
If, however, their identity is shadowy, their motivation is clear. They are dissatisfied with many policies of the Kennedy administration, especially on civil rights, nuclear disarmament and Vietnam, and consider that the death of the President is a price worth paying in order to reverse these policies. They fear that Kennedy plans to establish a political dynasty, with his brothers Bobby and Teddy succeeding him as President. They also have a sinister-sounding scheme, the details of which are never made clear, for "reducing" the population of the Third World as well as of groups such as blacks, Hispanics and poor whites in America itself.
Trumbo deals with one possible objection to this theory, namely that Oswald, far from having right-wing sympathies, was actually a known Communist sympathiser. In the film Oswald is portrayed as an innocent "patsy" framed by the conspirators who have employed a double to impersonate him and cast suspicion on him. There are, however, two more fundamental objections which the film ignores. The first is that Kennedy, as shown by his rhetoric over Berlin and his response to the Cuban missile crisis, was far from being the foreign policy dove that this film implies; indeed, during the 1960 election campaign he tried to position himself to the right of the Republicans on defence issues, alleging that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a "missile gap" to open up between America and the Soviet Union.
The second objection is that the American political system, under which the Vice-President automatically takes over in the event of the President's death, makes for continuity and makes it difficult to use assassination as a means of effecting policy change. Upon succeeding to the Presidency, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had initiated and continued nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviets (as his Republican successor Richard Nixon as to do). Admittedly, he did not withdraw American forces from Vietnam, but there is no hard evidence that Kennedy would have done such a thing had he survived.
The film was made in a semi-documentary style and was clearly shot on a small budget, despite the presence of two big Hollywood names, Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster. Both were noted for their left-wing views, which may explain why they agreed to take part. Following "Seven Days in May", Lancaster seemed to have a sideline in appearing in movies where he played villainous American army officers or right-wing extremists; "The Cassandra Crossing" and "The Osterman Weekend" are other examples. It seems that he sometimes allowed his political sympathies to cloud his artistic judgement; "Seven Days ." itself is a reasonably good film with a very good performance from Lancaster, but his other ventures into films of this type, "Executive Action" included, rank among the least distinguished episodes in his career.
One problem is that the story is told entirely from the perspective of the conspirators, and conspiracy is not in itself a very cinematic subject, leading to a static film dominated by too much talk and not action. A more important problem, however, arises from the uneasy mixture of fact and fiction; scenes (in colour) showing the fictional conspirators are intercut with actual period black-and-white newsreel footage. I felt that the film would have worked better if it had been made in one of two quite different ways. The filmmakers could have made a pure documentary examining the possibility that the assassination could have been the result of a conspiracy and presenting the arguments for and against such a thesis. Alternatively, they could have made a film about a plot to assassinate a fictitious President. Instead they offer us a combination of the two which could mislead viewers into thinking that they were seeing the "truth" about the Kennedy assassination. Despite a legal disclaimer at the beginning saying, effectively, "Don't take any of this seriously", the film pretends to a much greater depth of information than it actually possesses. It might just as well have been the Avenge Marilyn Committee who were to blame. 3/10
Like Oliver Stone's JFK from 1991, "Executive Action" deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and (unsurprisingly) portrays the assassination as a conspiracy. (What would be a surprise would be if any film were ever to suggest that the assassination was carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone). The idea that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy is, of course, a popular one, but the conspiracy theorists seem unable to agree who the conspirators actually were. There are a vast number of conspiracy theories out there, according to which JFK was gunned down by, or on the orders of, among others, the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Ku Klux Klan, Vice-President Johnson, partisans of the murdered South Vietnamese President Diem or fanatical devotees of Marilyn Monroe, determined to avenge the death of their heroine at the hands of one of Kennedy's hit squads.
That last theory was invented by the British satirist Auberon Waugh with his tongue firmly in his cheek; he even claimed to have been a prominent member of the Avenge Marilyn Committee himself. The others, however, are all taken seriously, at least by those who propose them. Given that the script for "Executive Action" was written by that old Communist Dalton Trumbo, it is hardly surprising that it attempts to place the blame with the political Right. The actual identity of the conspirators remains rather shadowy, but they are presumably prominent industrialists, right-wing politicians and figures from the US intelligence community.
If, however, their identity is shadowy, their motivation is clear. They are dissatisfied with many policies of the Kennedy administration, especially on civil rights, nuclear disarmament and Vietnam, and consider that the death of the President is a price worth paying in order to reverse these policies. They fear that Kennedy plans to establish a political dynasty, with his brothers Bobby and Teddy succeeding him as President. They also have a sinister-sounding scheme, the details of which are never made clear, for "reducing" the population of the Third World as well as of groups such as blacks, Hispanics and poor whites in America itself.
Trumbo deals with one possible objection to this theory, namely that Oswald, far from having right-wing sympathies, was actually a known Communist sympathiser. In the film Oswald is portrayed as an innocent "patsy" framed by the conspirators who have employed a double to impersonate him and cast suspicion on him. There are, however, two more fundamental objections which the film ignores. The first is that Kennedy, as shown by his rhetoric over Berlin and his response to the Cuban missile crisis, was far from being the foreign policy dove that this film implies; indeed, during the 1960 election campaign he tried to position himself to the right of the Republicans on defence issues, alleging that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a "missile gap" to open up between America and the Soviet Union.
The second objection is that the American political system, under which the Vice-President automatically takes over in the event of the President's death, makes for continuity and makes it difficult to use assassination as a means of effecting policy change. Upon succeeding to the Presidency, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had initiated and continued nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviets (as his Republican successor Richard Nixon as to do). Admittedly, he did not withdraw American forces from Vietnam, but there is no hard evidence that Kennedy would have done such a thing had he survived.
The film was made in a semi-documentary style and was clearly shot on a small budget, despite the presence of two big Hollywood names, Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster. Both were noted for their left-wing views, which may explain why they agreed to take part. Following "Seven Days in May", Lancaster seemed to have a sideline in appearing in movies where he played villainous American army officers or right-wing extremists; "The Cassandra Crossing" and "The Osterman Weekend" are other examples. It seems that he sometimes allowed his political sympathies to cloud his artistic judgement; "Seven Days ." itself is a reasonably good film with a very good performance from Lancaster, but his other ventures into films of this type, "Executive Action" included, rank among the least distinguished episodes in his career.
One problem is that the story is told entirely from the perspective of the conspirators, and conspiracy is not in itself a very cinematic subject, leading to a static film dominated by too much talk and not action. A more important problem, however, arises from the uneasy mixture of fact and fiction; scenes (in colour) showing the fictional conspirators are intercut with actual period black-and-white newsreel footage. I felt that the film would have worked better if it had been made in one of two quite different ways. The filmmakers could have made a pure documentary examining the possibility that the assassination could have been the result of a conspiracy and presenting the arguments for and against such a thesis. Alternatively, they could have made a film about a plot to assassinate a fictitious President. Instead they offer us a combination of the two which could mislead viewers into thinking that they were seeing the "truth" about the Kennedy assassination. Despite a legal disclaimer at the beginning saying, effectively, "Don't take any of this seriously", the film pretends to a much greater depth of information than it actually possesses. It might just as well have been the Avenge Marilyn Committee who were to blame. 3/10