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.
