Executive Action is an American political thriller film. It is a fictionalized account of a conspiracy to assassinate United States President John F. Kennedy. Released in November 1973 on the tenth anniversary of the JFK assassination, the film stars Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer. It was directed by David Miller, produced by Edward Lewis, and written by Dalton Trumbo. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Executive Action by Donald Freed and Mark Lane, published earlier in 1973; the novel also includes special material by Stephen Jaffe. Freed and Lane received film credits for their story, and Jaffe was the film's technical adviser and uncredited supervising producer.
Plot
A narrator states that when asked years later about the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission report, former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson "expressed misgivings" that the commission's lone-gunman conclusion was correct. The narration ends by mentioning that the interview segment did not run on television, and it was cut from a program about Johnson at his own request.
At a June 1963 gathering in the palatial home of Robert Foster, shadowy figures from American industry, politics, and intelligence discuss their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration. Foster and the others try to persuade Harold Ferguson, a powerful oil magnate dressed in white, to back their plans for Kennedy's assassination. Foster's fellow conspirator James Farrington, a black-ops specialist, labels this an "executive action" (the intelligence term for assassinating a head of state). In a presentation to the assembled group, Farrington shows that magnicide is indeed a viable option. As examples, he cites the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assassinations, along with a few failed attempts, such as against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Farrington explains that these actions were carried out by alleged lone fanatics (later scenes show the grooming process unwittingly undergone by Lee Harvey Oswald to fulfill the lone-fanatic role in the JFK assassination). He adds that "the best chance for success would be to act during a motorcade, because they are always planned well in advance, allow for firing from three angles under cover and provide clean escapes during the following confusion."
Ferguson remains unconvinced, saying such schemes are "tolerable only if they're necessary, and permissible only if they work." Although obtaining Ferguson's approval is crucial to the conspirators, Farrington proceeds to organize shooting Teams A and B in anticipation that Ferguson will eventually change his mind. Team A is shown practicing in the Mojave Desert, firing at moving targets at medium-to-long range. One of the shooters says he can only guarantee the operation's success if he fires at a target travelling less than 15 miles per hour.
After a subsequent meeting, several of the conspirators discuss their paranoid fears about the future of the U.S. under the Kennedy brothers, and the imperiled security of ruling-class whites across the globe. Foster and Farrington seem privy to plans known to the CIA that Ferguson, a civilian, is perhaps unaware of. Foster forecasts the planet's population in a couple decades at seven billion, "most of them brown, yellow or black. All of them hungry.... They'll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America."
Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, estimated that the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren Commission index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40, would be 98.16 percent, or one out of 1.2. Assuming a median age of 35, the number would be 57.09 percent, or one out of 1.75.
Cast
- Burt Lancaster as James Farrington
- Robert Ryan as Robert Foster
- Will Geer as Harold Ferguson
- John Anderson as Halliday
- Ed Lauter as Operations Chief - Team A
- President John F. Kennedy Archival Footage
Production
The actor Donald Sutherland is credited with conceiving the idea for the film in 1972. He hired Mark Lane and Donald Freed to write the screenplay. Sutherland planned to act in and produce Executive Action, but he was compelled to abandon the project after failing to obtain studio financing, and ended up taking a role in another film. The project was then picked up by producer Edward Lewis.
The original Lane-Freed screenplay strongly implicated the CIA in the JFK assassination. In fact, the film's subtitle was "Conspiracy in America", with the first letters highlighted in red to spell out the Agency's initials. When he saw Trumbo's rewrite of their screenplay, Lane complained that the central hypothesis had been compromised: "He [Trumbo] didn't have the guts to stay with the position we took.... Ironically, the only organization cleared by the film is the CIA."
Executive Action was Robert Ryan's final film: he died of cancer four months before its release. Stephen Jaffe, an investigator who had worked with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison during his investigation into the assassination, was the film's technical adviser, supervising producer, and also served as a press representative. As a rule, the locations were not disclosed, although it was known that Tulsa, Oklahoma was doubling for Dallas in a number of scenes. Freed commented on the unusual presence of security guards on the set. The purpose of Executive Action is made apparent by the following statement, which displays after the opening credits:
Music
The film's musical score was composed by Randy Edelman.
Controversies
The day after Executive Action opened, The New York Times reported that National General Pictures had filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against NBC. The lawsuit alleged that the NBC-affiliated New York City station, WNBC-TV, breached an agreement with National General by cancelling a promotional commercial for Executive Action. The station objected to two particular images as "too violent": (1) the president in an open limousine being viewed through a telescopic gunsight, and (2) "a scene in which a marksman is shown firing practice shots at a target in the desert." Stations in Boston and Los Angeles also refused to air the promotional spots. Ira Teller, the director of advertising and publicity for National General, said after NBC turned down the commercial, "We went to the American Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System to seek available time, but were told that none was available." The lack of advertising, and limited theater distribution, contributed to an early disappearance of Executive Action. It wasn't seen on television until the late 1980s.
Executive Action was the first film to depict a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. It has been contrasted with Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, which also posits a conspiracy. Although Executive Action was released near the tenth anniversary of the assassination, the film received little attention, and caused relatively little controversy compared to Stone's much more famous work. In a 1990s interview, Mark Lane suggested that the different reactions may have been partly due to the timing of Executive Actions release: "[I]t was too close to the assassination and people weren't ready to talk about it. It's been almost 30 years since the assassination and there's a whole new generation out there that really wants to know what went on."
In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called it "so graceless it's beyond using even as a demonstration of ineptitude.... It's a dodo bird of a movie, the winner of the Tora! Tora! Tora! prize—in miniature—for 1973, with matchlessly dull performances". Leonard Maltin declared the film a "bomb", dismissing it as an "Excruciatingly dull thriller [that] promised to clear the air about JFK's assassination but was more successful at clearing theaters."
In contrast, The New York Times gave it a positive review, with Nora Sayre writing that the film "offers a tactful, low-key blend of fact and invention. The film makers do not insist that they have solved John Kennedy's murder; instead, they simply evoke what might have happened...The film's sternest and strongest point is that only a crazed person acting on his own would have been acceptable to the American public — which, at that time, certainly did not want to believe in a conspiracy."
Meanwhile, Roger Ebert was ambivalent, giving the film two out of four stars and calling it "a dramatized rewrite of all those old assassination conspiracy books." Ebert stated, "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."
Home media
On 23 October 2007, Executive Action was released on DVD in the U.S. and Canada. The film is available on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movie, and Fandango at Home.
See also
- Assassination of John F. Kennedy in popular culture
- JFK (1991), an Oliver Stone film about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that also takes a conspiracy angle.
- Ruby (1992), a film centering around Jack Ruby that depicts a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
- List of American films of 1973