Executive Action ***** (1973, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer) – Classic Movie Review 7,381

The 1973 film Executive Action is a brilliant political thriller constructing a conspiracy theory around President Kennedy’s assassination. Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan play the leaders of a right-wing plot to use Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall guy.

Director David Miller’s brilliant 1973 American conspiracy film Executive Action is an excellently conceived political thriller constructing a speculative conspiracy theory fiction around President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

It is everything a conspiracy movie should be, or you could hope it would be – thoughtful, intelligent, tensely directed, grippingly acted, taut and short (at just 91 minutes).

Burt Lancaster stars in Executive Action (1973).

In sterling performances, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan play James Farrington and Robert Foster, the leaders of the right-wing plot to use Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall guy in President John F Kennedy’s assassination.

Executive Action is fascinating to compare with Oliver Stone’s later JFK (1991), as well as Seven Days in May (1964), The Conversation (1974) and The Parallax View (1974).

Robert Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973).

It is the noble Robert Ryan’s penultimate role before his death of lung cancer on 11 July 1973, aged 63. His last performance was in The Iceman Cometh (1973), based on the Eugene O’Neill play. The Iceman Cometh and Executive Action were both released in November 1973 after Ryan’s death.

The expert screenplay by the formerly blacklisted Dalton Trumbo is based on Donald Freed and Mark Lane’s story. Trumbo previously worked with Miller on Lonely Are the Brave (1962).

Also in the cast are Will Geer, Gilbert Green, John Anderson, Paul Carr, Ed Lauter, Lloyd Gough, Sidney Clute and Dick Miller.

Steve Jaffe, former DA Jim Garrison’s investigator, is technical consultant and supervising producer.

Donald Sutherland conceived the film and hired Donald Freed and Mark Lane to write the screenplay, intending to star and produce, but had to abandon it after failing to obtain financing. To get made finally, the film had a low budget of under $1 million. An obsessively crusading Mark Lane went on to write the 1966 number-one bestseller Rush to Judgment.

Release date: November 7, 1973.

It was unsupported by harsh and misguided American critics: Pauline Kael called it a ‘feeble, insensitive fictionalisation, a dodo-bird of a movie, with matchlessly dull performances.’ Leonard Maltin judged it a bomb, an ‘excruciatingly dull thriller that promised to clear the air about JFK’s assassination but was more successful at clearing theatres.’ Roger Ebert called it ‘a dramatised rewrite of all those old assassination conspiracy books. There’s something exploitative and unseemly in the way this movie takes the real blood and anguish and fits it neatly into a semi-documentary thriller. It doesn’t seem much to want to entertain.’ Thanks, guys, but no thanks.

Executive Action is directed by David Miller, runs 93 minutes, is made by EA Enterprises and Wakefield-Orloff, is released by National General Pictures, is written by Dalton Trumbo, based on a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane, is shot in colour by Robert Steadman, is produced by Edward Lewis, and is scored by Randy Edelman.

The cast are Burt Lancaster as James Farrington, Robert Ryan as Robert Foster, Will Geer as Harold Ferguson, John Anderson as Halliday, Ed Lauter as Operations Chief, Gilbert Green, Paul Carr, Lloyd Gough, Sidney Clute and Dick Miller. President John F Kennedy appears in archival footage.

American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator Mark Lane (February 24, 1927 – May 10, 2016) is best known as a researcher, author and conspiracy theorist on the assassination of President John F.Kennedy. From his 1966 number-one bestselling critique of the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment to Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, published in 2011, Lane wrote at least four major works on the JFK assassination and ten books overall.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7,381

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