Executive Action (film)

Executive Action
Directed by	David Miller
Written by	Dalton Trumbo Donald Freed (story) Mark Lane (story)
Produced by	Edward Lewis
Starring	Burt Lancaster Robert Ryan
Cinematography	Robert Steadman
Edited by	George Grenville
Music by	Randy Edelman
Distributed by	Warner Home Video (VHS)
Release dates	November 7, 1973
Running time	91 min.
Country	USA
Language	English

Executive Action is a 1973 movie about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, written by Dalton Trumbo, Donald Freed and Mark Lane.

It is one of two American films to present a dramatization portraying the JFK assassination as a conspiracy (the other being Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK). Despite many similarities of the plotline to JFK, Executive Action presents a far more sober and unemotional account of the Kennedy Assasiniation than the hysterical and confused Stone movie. The film is done in an almost documentary style and was clearly filmed on a small budget, despite the presence of two big Hollywood names - Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster. Another big difference to JFK is that the story is told entirely from the perspective of the conspirators.

Plot

Right at the beginning we are introduced to a gathering of shadowy industrial, political and former US intelligence figures who are giving vent to their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration. The scence takes place in the lush garden of the lead conspirator, Robert Ryan, presumably a Texas oil baron. He and the others are trying to convince an unnamed white-suited and bearded figure - obviously a hugely powerful US industry magnate - to back their plans for an assassination of Kennedy. He remains unconvinced saying 'I don't like such schemes and they can only be justified when they are absolutely necessary and when they work.' Burt Lancaster, a black ops specialist, is also among the group. The film then cuts to somewhere in the desert where a shooting team is doing target practice at a moving object. One of the shooters says that they can only guarantee the operation's success by slowing down the target to 15 mph. All these events we assume take place around 1962-63.

The film then intercuts to conversations among the lead conspirators, Lancaster and Ryan, and preparations for the assassination. The approval of the man in the white suit is crucial to the conspirators, although Lancaster proceeds to organize two shooting teams in anticipation that he will change his mind.

We then see sequences of the man in the white suit watching contemporary newsreel and becoming clearly concerned at Kennedy's increasingly 'liberal' direction: action on civil rights, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, nuclear disarmament. The deciding moment comes when he's watching an anti-Kennedy news report on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. It is followed by Kennedy's 'irresponsible' October 1963 decision to withdraw all US advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1965, effectively ending America's direct involvement in the Vietnam War. He picks up the phone to tell Ryan he now fully supports their project.

While the motives of the man in the white suit are clear, through dialogues between Ryan and Lancaster, the film attempts to cast light on the murky paranoid fears of the conspirators about the future of America and the white races. In an eerily prohpetic quote, Ryan forecasts the population of the third world in 2000 at 5 billion, 'All hungry and all trying to get into Europe and America'. He sees Vietnam as an opportunity to control the developing world and reduce its population to 50 million: 'I've seen the plans,' says Ryan, adding that they can then apply the same 'birth-control' methods to unwanted groups in the US: poor whites, blacks and Latinos.

The film postulates the same theory as JFK that Lee Harvey Oswald is being steered to become the conspiracy's 'patsy'; unlike JFK, the conspirators use a double of Oswald in the weeks leading up to the assassination to leave behind a trail that the authorities can easily follow and link him to the assassination. The film makes no explicit link to US government agencies and the conspiracy, although the professionalism of Lancaster's shooting team clearly indicates they have worked for the CIA on special assignments. The film implies that most of the law enforcement and govenrment agencies were not involved, but just grossly inept: no special measures were taken for the president's safety in Dallas; there is no communication between the FBI, CIA and Secret Service on possible security risks; even the head of the Secret Service stays in Washington during the visit. This explanation helps understand why the authorities were so keen to pin the blame on Oswald, who is 'offered' to the authorities as an easy escape from any accusations of their own negligence.

The post-assassination conspiracy is also covered in the film. Lancaster tells the head of the shooting teams, Chris, his men will never have to work again. All the assassins are black ops professionals trained never to talk about operations they are involved in. Each one is offered $25,000 per year for the next five years provided the operation's cover isn't blown. If the cover remains intact in five years time (1968) 'every man jack of them' (Lancaster) will receive a further $100,000 into their Swiss bank accounts. The head of the shooting teams then tells Lancaster: 'You just told me who we're going to hit.'

At the end of the film a photo collage is shown of witnesses who died from unnatural causes within five years of the assassination. A voice-over says that an actuary of the British newspaper The Sunday Times calculated the probability that all these people who witnessed the assassination would die within that period of time to be 5 billion-to-one.

The original music is by Randy Edelman.

Executive action is also a term used in the mid-20th century by the CIA.

External links

• Executive Action at IMDb