User Reviews

This is the direct to the point account of a group of wealthy businessmen who brought together their brains and bucks to plot one of the greatest crimes of the past 100 years. They want to assassinate the President because of his extremist views. The motives are clear-racial relations, Vietnam, Cuba, general liberalism. The men involved? Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer, among others. What makes this scary? This is America less than 20 years after the fall of Nazi Germany and what is happening? Money and power are threatening freedom for all. These men truly believe that the Blacks and Hispanics should be given the same fate as the Jews of World War II. No lesson learned from those despicable crimes. Lancaster, ironically resembling Ronald Reagan, is the head of the organization, and dressed in every day casual clothes shows up at a greasy spoon to discuss the actual assassination. Robert Ryan, who sadly passed away in 1973, was very busy, appearing in four theatrical movies and one TV movie. Will Geer (Grandpa Walton!) is very memorable as the most sympathetic of the men, presenting reasonable doubts and expressing moral concerns for their plot. He also has rational reasons for going along with the group. The events building up to that November day in Dallas are presented directly, unapologetically, and seemingly historically accurate. Actual footage was interspersed with the filmed. Ironically, many of the on-lookers at the parade look very nefarious in their close-ups and it makes you wonder, how many thousands there actually knew this was going to take place? It is scary and still potent today. Stone made his film as an epic; This film is simply done to present an idea to the public to get them thinking. All this with the Watergate scandal on the front page. Considering it was Warner Brothers, the veteran studio of exposing crime to the public, producing this film, it's also a historically important film in our cinema past.

This political thriller purports to provide an alternative to the Warren Commission's report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Directed by David Miller, it features a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo that was based on the story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane's novel Rush to Judgment.

It stars Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan (among others) as wealthy conspirators that want to eliminate the POTUS before he and the rest of the Kennedy clan - they foresee the White House being occupied by JFK, then Robert followed by Teddy through 1984 - can implement their agenda, which would change the United States of America into an intolerable country for them.

Actual newsreel footage is used to chronicle the President's steps: a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the promise of equal rights for Negroes (Kennedy's words), and military withdrawal from Vietnam, which the conspirators fear would allow the Communists to take over Asia.

The actions finally convince a Southerner (played by Will Geer) to fund the assassination plot which, according to the film, included three gunmen (one behind a fence on a grassy knoll), and making a patsy out of Oswald, who was merely a Texas School Book Depository employee when the shots rang out near Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas at half past noon on that fateful day.

After Jack Ruby kills Oswald, the film's denouement includes Ryan receiving a phone call that Lancaster's character has died, then pictures of several other eyewitnesses (who were reportedly killed or died mysteriously in subsequent years) are shown.

A conspiracy theorist's delight!

"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

I watched this film recently with my 14 year old son. That he chose this film out a group of films that we had around the house was interesting in itself as it showed his interest in the subject. I was able to recount to him where I was at the time of the assassination of JFK. I was 17 years old in high school. We were writing a math exam and at the conclusion of the exam the teacher told us that JFK had been assassinated. We were of course quite shocked because JFK had been a hero to many of us.

Over the next few days we were transfixed by the television watching the events of the funeral and Lee Harvey Oswald the accused assassin. When Lee Harvey Oswald was himself assassinated on television right before us it was second shock. The assassination of JFK and LHO set the tone for the turbulent 1960's that was to follow. And it included the assassinations of two other giants of the period Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

I confess I barely recalled this picture when it came out as it seemed to come and go with barely a murmur. Certainly if one were to base this picture purely on its production values (it came off more like some cheap B thriller and Leonard Maitlin rated it as BOMB) and its wooden staid acting you would probably have wanted to avoid it. BOth Lancaster and Ryan were at best subdued in their roles while Will Geer was a delight to watch. Hard to believe he was later Grandpa Walton. Ryan and Lancaster were two of my favourite actors at the time and even today I will look for old Ryan or Lancaster films especially their early edgy noir films.

But this film not only stands the test of time it still resonates today. The interspersing of archive footage of Kennedy and Oswald was eerie and added to the tension. The long scene where they are putting together a deliberate doctored photo of Oswald is a grim reminder that it was later shown that the photo was doctored. And the ending where the TV announcer tells us that over the next few years 18 material witnesses were dead from being murdered or a gruesome accident. The odds of course being one hundred thousand trillion to one that an event such as that could take place.

That John F. Kennedy was assassinated by one man Lee Harvey Oswald is today for many of us a grim joke. It was too big for one man just like the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy was too big for one man as well. That after the assassination of JFK his major planks of the test ban treaty was stopped and the Vietnam war that he wanted to wind down was instead escalated reminds us of the words of former President Dwight Eisenhower warning us about the military industrial complex (especially in the opening scenes of "Why We FIght - 2005". Kennedy quite simply was a threat to the military industrial complex so he had to be taken down. The same for King and Bobby Kennedy.

Given the events since the assassination of JFK the warnings are prescient as are the other assassinations. Today we have George W. Bush an endless war for oil and global domination by the American Empire and a threat to WW3 with this time America as the bad guys. Of course equally there are millions of Americans who still remember and admire JFK and remember what he wanted to do. Sadly they are out of power but we are there and we shall never forget and it will be passed on to our sons and daughters.

As I said his assassination still resonates today and this film is a reminder. A film everyone should see.

David Chapman Toronto, Canada

If it's a given that infamous international events - like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - which have never been fully satisfactorily explained are fair game for conspiracy theorists then Executive Action has as much right as any other to its moment in the sun. The first obligation of any film expounding a conspiracy is plausibility and the movie asserts nothing that is beyond the capabilities of a well- to-highly organised group of like-minded people with virtually unlimited funds and access to a network of highly-skilled professional assassins. in saying this I may have underlined just a fraction of the difficulties faced by any group of fanatics who have no use for a democratic form of government. If we put this to one side we are left with some excellent performances. If Robert Ryan is the best actor overall by a country mile - and here I'm basing judgment on a lifetime career - then Burt Lancaster and Will Geer are certainly fit to be mentioned in the same breath. All in all a provocative and entertaining film.

To those who have studied the assassination of JFK through the years this film is very polarizing. Almost everyone has an opinion of whether or not a conspiracy was involved, and government studies have come to differing conclusions. Opinions are like navels, we all have them. It astounds me still that a movie like this with heavyweight actors such as Lancaster, and Ryan could be made ten years after the assassination. Like many alive I recall when this movie debuted in theaters and then disappeared from theaters. I never got a chance to see it then, but was told it was very "Upsetting." Having seen it at in 2011 I would use the word disturbing. The story is told in a matter of fact, low key manner, that men of power and wealth discuss and come to feel that the 35th President must die. It is very chilling to me that it is told in such a low key, almost clinical manner. There is a cabal of power brokers, lead by Geer, who is eventually convinced of, and gives the okay to the assassination. These "Superpatriots" display an arrogant, and insular skewed view of the world and imply that "They know best." Where have we seen that attitude before? Even if you don't buy the conspiracy angle, this is a great movie, well made. The hairstyles, cars folks drove and other incidentals are, in my opinion, not at all important. The message is the thing, and the thing is to think.