Executive Action

Plot synopsis:
A narrator states that when President Lyndon Johnson was asked about the Kennedy Assassination and the Warren Commission report, he said he doubted the findings of the Commission. The narration ends with the mention that the segment did not run on television and was cut from a program about Johnson, at his own request.
At a gathering in June 1963, shadowy industrial, political and former US intelligence figures discuss their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration. In the plush surroundings of lead conspirator Robert Foster (Robert Ryan), he and the others try to persuade Harold Ferguson (Will Geer), a powerful oil magnate dressed in white, to back their plans for an assassination of Kennedy. He remains unconvinced, saying, "I don't like such schemes. They're only tolerable when necessary, and only permissible when they work." James Farrington (Burt Lancaster), a black ops specialist, is also among the group: He shows Ferguson and others that a careful assassination of a U.S. President can be done under certain conditions, and refers to the murders of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley as examples, and includes assassination attempts of others including Roosevelt in 1933, referring to the practice as "executive action".
In the Mojave Desert, a hit squad practice shooting moving targets at medium-to-long range. One of the shooters says that he can only guarantee the operation's success if he fires from vantage point at target moving at or under 15 miles per hour.
The lead conspirators, Farrington and Foster, discuss preparations for the assassination. Obtaining Ferguson's approval is crucial to the conspirators, although Farrington proceeds to organize two shooting teams in anticipation that Ferguson will change his mind. Ferguson, meanwhile, watches news reports and becomes highly concerned at Kennedy's increasingly "liberal" direction: action on civil rights, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and nuclear disarmament. The deciding moment comes when he is watching an anti-Kennedy news report on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. It is followed by Kennedy's October 1963 decision, National Security Action Memorandum #263 to withdraw all US advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1965, effectively ending America's direct involvement in the Vietnam War. Ferguson calls Foster and tells him he now supports their project.
Foster and Farrington discuss their murky paranoid fears about the future of the country under President Kennedy, and the security of ruling-class white people around the world. Foster forecasts the population of the world in 2000 at 7 billion, the majority of them non-white; " swarming out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America." He sees victory in Vietnam as an opportunity to control the developing world and reduce its population to 550 million, adding that they can then apply the same "birth-control" methods to unwanted groups in the US: poor whites, blacks and Latinos. Foster, it seems, is privy to plans known to the CIA, or perhaps knowledge of even more secret information unknown to Ferguson, a civilian.
The scene of the shooting is described. As news of the assassination reaches the conspirators, the film describes the effects. Farrington and his assistant discuss the fallout from the assassination, especially how to deal with the fact that Oswald has survived. Farrington contacts nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who stalks and kills Oswald.
While the real assassins leave Dallas, the conspirators work to cover up the evidence. They discuss the political fallout in Washington, D.C., concerned about retribution from Robert F. Kennedy and the "believability" of the plot. Foster states that "Bobby Kennedy is not thinking as Attorney General but as a grieving brother. By the time he recovers it will be too late." The conspirators agree that people will believe in the story because "they want to believe the story." Soon after, Foster receives a call from Farrington's assistant: Farrington has died of a heart attack "at Parkland Hospital." The conspirators are now insulated from the link to the group that committed the killings.
Their work is not quite finished. A photo collage is shown of 18 material witnesses, all but two of whom, it says, died from unnatural causes within three 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 100,000 trillion to one.

Tags: murder

Review:
By 1973, the year of the film's release, critics, such as Mark Lane's 1966 Rush to Judgment, had shredded much of the Warren Commission Report (1964), putting the government's lone assassin theory on the strictly defensive.
In short, many Americans were ready to believe in 1973 what they weren't ready to believe in 1963, namely that the official Report was an expedient cover-up, and that the true facts surrounding Kennedy's murder had yet to be revealed.Executive Action stepped into the breach, hoping to reach the non-book reading public and alert them to what critics on the left felt was a likely version of the true facts.
With hardly any of the controversy of the Oliver Stone & Kevin Costner version.A number of big oil-men get together in June 1963 to plan to assassinate JFK because his policies, domestic as well as foreign, are a threat to their money and power.
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.
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..
The action cuts between meetings between these men, the preparations of the gunmen and their target practice, and the recruitment and actions of a Lee Harvey Oswald lookalike.While not being a fact-based and detailed account like the portrayal of Jim Garrison's investigation in Oliver Stone's excellent JFK (1991), Executive Action makes no claims to be historical fact, but instead a theory of how Kennedy's assassination could have been planned.
While it is certainly very interesting from a conspiracy- theorists point-of-view, the film works far better as a straightforward thriller, and certainly manages to build up plenty of tension regardless of the fact that we know what is going to happen, and that what is being played out in front of us is unlikely to be true.It's a cold and emotionless film, which made me like it more.
But its use of both dramatized scenes and archival footage provides an interesting, though controversial, story written by the talented Dalton Trumbo.Much of the conspiracy theory is similar to Oliver Stone's "JFK", and it does a good job of integrating known evidence (such as witness reports and information we know about Lee Harvey Oswald) and nearly mythologized explanations of the assassination (like the "grassy knoll").Starring Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan (in his penultimate film) and Will Geer as the three men who organize the hit, the film carries an emotional content for anyone who lived through the event in 1963.
It also serves as an indictment of the Secret Service and the Dallas Police Department, criticizing their sloppy procedures and their unprofessional methods.Though many people have accepted the Warren Commission's lone gunman explanation, conspiracy theorists abound even now, especially since some of the evidence is difficult to explain.As we view the film today, it is nearly amusing to hear the conspirators say, in ignorant naivete, that JFK's reputation and personal life are smear proof.
Music is by Randy Edelman and cinematography by Robert Steadman.In essence it's a film that is offering up a different theory to the Warren Commission's report that ruled Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F.
Entertaining and interesting film which puts forward a seemingly plausible theory as to why JFK was assassinated.The main thought seems to be that President Kennedy's ideas in regard to nuclear disarmament, racial equality and ensuring a square deal for America's most lowly paid workers were just too radical as far as the country's hard line conservatives were concerned.Appears to have been generally well researched and non sensationalist.However, it's a fair criticism to note that some of the finer points of period detail are slightly shaky.
Made conspiracy challenging."Executive Action" from 1973 is another film that theorizes how the assassination of JFK went down - this time, it's a bunch of rogue intelligence agents, conservative politicians, greedy businessmen who were worried about President Kennedy's policies on race relations, ending the Vietnam War, and ending the oil depletion allowance.
Never could get over that."Executive Action" is handled in a very naturalistic style; the actors speak conversationally, and it makes what they're planning scarier.The most impressive part of the film is showing that 18 material witnesses to the assassination were dead by 1967.
The movie takes a pragmatic approach to the event and unlike the later film, JFK, does not set up the counter-conspiracy protagonists nor the after-assassination cover-up as a dramatic foil.
It is similar to the revelatory Ned Beatty scenes in the film, Network, in the scene where the Kennedy killers assure each other that the public will, "want to believe what they are told." That is the full extent of the American public's "role" in the movie, showing just the conception, practicing for and execution of President Kennedy.
Executive action is a tight and well made thriller based on this hypotheses, about a conspiracy.You might even say that the more famous JFK(D: Oliver Stone) is based on Miller's film.
And it is of course always a pleasure to watch Robert Ryan, an old pro and a no nonsense actor, always with integrity and a "know how" in his roles.If you want to see a real good thriller, regardless of your own thoughts about a president's death, you are on with Executive Action..
The filmmakers choose not to be sensational with the material (as Oliver Stone did with JFK) and by showing it "as it might have happened" (to quote the film itself) the filmmakers make a good case for a conspiracy in the assassination.
Executive Action blends fiction and historical fact into creating one possible scenario to who was responsible for the assassination of JFK, but one which the movie makes feel convincing.
The middle portion of the film drags as the story becomes less eventful, but the suspense builds up once the day of the assassination has arrived.Executive Action was made during a period when paranoia/conspiracy thrillers where at their height and right during the Watergate scandal; yet has been swept under the rug of history as it is the type of film which would be easily dismissed by critics for being speculative and other such dirty words.
During it the film's screenwriter Dalton Trumbo states he didn't believe in any conspiracy theories until he read the Warren Report and a dozen books on the subject and became convinced the president had been killed by bullets from two different angles.
This is a quite good film; I based that on a) when we played the DVD in our home, it was not stopped or interrupted for any reason, we were engaged enough to not be distracted, and b) you will note that those IMDb reviews which "hate" the film are not taking issue with the film itself, but that they do not believe there is a conspiracy and are therefore compelled to belittle or insult anyone offering a differing opinion.On the movie's merits alone, it does present a provocative case, it certainly gives rise to at least room for question.
Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer are excellent in their respective roles as rather loosely defined business tycoons and intelligence establishment types who plan and execute the assassination of President Kennedy, based on sincere albeit misguided and backward motivations.
Although this film has been eclipsed by Oliver Stone's JFK, Executive Action points to an alternative view of the Kennedy Assassination.
He puts together the shooters and he's got a plan to set up a patsy in Lee Harvey Oswald.Most people in the USA have a casual familiarity with the bare-bones facts of the Kennedy Assassination so the film will come in for its share of criticism.
It's striking that in 1973, it was obvious that there had to be the plot, involving government agencies, wealthy businessman who organized and gave logistic support and several perpetrators which carried out the attack, and in "JFK", Oliver Stone added the mafia, and Cuban exiles, on lower level, and military industrial complex in the place of oil tycoons that were the main force "behind the scenes" in "Executive action", as a party that benefited the most from the assassination.This picture shows that the plot to kill John Kennedy is worked out and organized in a way that there's no doubt that it leads to the highest ranking government officials and all the industrial and banking tycoons that had everything to loose with JFK's policy of non involvement, racial equality and détente with the USSR, and such politics just swept the rug under the feet of every force that keeps America going up until today.
Oliver Stone's "JFK" is far superior as cinema to this effort: production values, acting, script, and scope all favor the later, longer Stone film.That said, I can recommend this little film to any viewer who would like to ponder the Warren Report at a deliberate pace and enjoy a conspiracy scenario created largely before Watergate "upped the ante" by revealing demonstrable evil."Executive Action" surpasses "JFK" in the words on the screen at each movie's end.
This film, made 10 years after the assassination, was just one of many attempts to persuade the public that JFK had to have been bumped off by Texas right-wingers and not by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Even though they never specify exactly who committed this ultimate crime, the story these moviemakers tell provides a satisfactory enough general idea as to what kind of executives could have been motivated to carry out such a terribly asinine agenda in a totally professional way that is probably still producing un-American results for them and theirs today in the absence of true democratic leadership that was largely eliminated by actions abruptly ending an incredibly popular presidency..
This fascinating movie must have been one of the first to address openly the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination and deserves kudos for that alone, although its merit as purely cinematic entertainment, viewed from 35 years hence are slightly more questionable now.Not unnaturally, the film suffers somewhat in comparison to the plethora of subsequent TV documentaries and film-"faction" interpretation of events any one of which can convince me on a good day that theirs is the truth!
The polemic here is that a crack "assassination squad" with Burt Lancaster at the helm (on a strictly non-participatory basis, of course) is bankrolled by a high-roller Southern politician (Will Geer) and syphoned through chief coordinator Robert Ryan on the premise that a possible Kennedy dynasty, moving from JFK to Robert and then Teddy Kennedy, standing for amongst other things civil rights and withdrawal from Vietnam, would derail the American Dream to the extent that "executive action" (in other words assassination) is required to halt them in their tracks.
The supporting roles hold up better, particularly the Lee Harvey Oswald lookalike and drill-commander of Lancaster's unit.As hinted above, with the welter of material now in the public domain and on celluloid, "Executive Action" can seem a little underpowered, especially compared to Oliver Stone's gargantuan but flawed "JFK".
there is one particular scene where Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster discuss the need for population control of the masses,feeling like he was 'reading from the Doomsday book';'well somebody has to do it'was the reply.This to me IS the real point the film makes in that perversion of Malthus and Darwin.The absolute unquestioning supposition that they are right;this pervades the whole film and chilled me to the bone,(in a way it reminded me of Angus Wilsons 'The old men of the zoo)',which was televised by the BBC in the early eighties,and both reflecting A rearguard,old fashioned,and very conservative view in their 'rightious' right to rule.God help us all if this is true today!.
The appeal of this motion-picture for me--and, I surmise, the reason it was made--is not so much to be a profitable work of art, but rather, a courageous effort to search for the truth.The obscurity of the film shows that, despite the efforts of courageous progressives who put their money where their hearts were- -Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, to name just a few--the reactionary, established powers had the last laugh.Because the established order of the financial-military mafia that rules this country can only be sustained through fiction and, consequently, any social commentary trending towards fact must be marginalized or lampooned as 'conspiracy theory.'Now, down to a couple of brass tacks.
And yes, I mean incredible in the literal sense: a bit of investigatory incompetence here and there would be understandable--but the consistency of these 'errors' shows conclusively a deliberate effort to mask what really happened.Please remember that Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster also were part of Seven Days in May, which JFK asked Frankheimer to make, a movie about a right-wing military takeover of the USA.So for all those who poo-poo the idea of a JFK conspiracy and commonly dismiss believers in such a conspiracy as lunatics, consider the fact that such outstanding individuals as Douglas, Lancaster, and Frankenheimer, intelligent, and with many contacts-- BUT with a lot of DISincentives, nevertheless repeatedly made pointed efforts suggesting the existence of an organized plot to subvert democracy in the USA, doesn't this give you pause?This is a reasonable representation of how the JFK conspiracy assassination may have been planned and executed; it's muted and almost documentary in approach, but this undramatic approach only makes it more powerful..
This movie deals with a possible, fictional plot to carry out the actual assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and - the potential motives behind it.
I read books and watched videos and, when I gained access to the new miracle of the Internet ten years ago, began to do serious research on the subject.The latest I have found is a 55-minute segment aired only once on the History Channel and then was immediately banned, and it can now be found on YouTube in five ten-plus-minute segments (urls below).Most of the suggested accounts present a set of circumstances and chain of events that appear to justify the assassination to those allegedly perpetrating it, but what I believe was the real reason is strangely absent from most accounts.My beliefs: JFK was doing some things which radically departed from long established "norms" of the time.
The point I am making is that there is no frontal entry on the President, which means he could not have been shot from the grassy knoll as the three movies Executive Action, JFK, and Ruby surmise!
Released 10 years after the assassination, this film seeks wants you to ask questions about The Warren Commission Report's evaluation of Who Killed Kennedy.
And the best of all these movies is WINTER KILLS.The filmmakers behind EXECUTIVE ACTION have the known, undisputed facts of JFK's assassination: the where and the when.
Executive Action (1973)** (out of 4) Almost exactly ten years after the assassination of President Kennedy, this film was released to theaters and quickly disappeared due to the controversy it started.
After all, we know that the assassins didn't miss and Kennedy died.Nevertheless, "Executive Action" did not stir up the controversy that the sensational Oliver Stone movie "JFK" with Kevin Costner generated many years later.
Oliver Stone's JFK was gripping and you wanted to believe the conspiracy theory in the film.
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!.
For me, it is simply a question of whether the movie is sufficiently credible to someone like me who has not studied the issue but has only heard that there are conspiracy theories out there that challenge the official version, which is that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F.