Executive Action

With all the mistrust, paranoia and insanity raging through our body politic, it might help to recall a simpler, more innocent time. Or we could look at the 1970s, when conspiracy theories actually had a basis in fact.

Nineteen years before Oliver Stone's JFK came Executive Action (1973). Loosely based on Mark Lane's book Rush to Judgment, this is the first Hollywood film to address the John F. Kennedy Assassination. It's far more measured and down-to-earth in its depiction of a plot to kill Kennedy, and it's easier to swallow than Stone's outlandish pronouncements. But it also lacks Stone's artistry and dramatic sense, and the movie plays more as a curio than a compelling drama.

A cabal of right-wing Americans - businessmen and intelligence agents - are disgusted with John F. Kennedy's liberal policies. After he announces a planned withdrawal from Vietnam, endorses the Civil Rights Movement and signs a Test Ban Treaty with Russia, Robert Foster (Robert Ryan) and Ferguson (Will Geer) enlist ex-CIA man James Farrington (Burt Lancaster) to orchestrate Kennedy's assassination. Enlisting a complex scheme involving multiple assassins, forged documents and a "phony" Lee Harvey Oswald (James MacColl), the plot goes off without a hitch.

Executive Action makes a ridiculous theory palatable. Dalton Trumbo's script plays on Kennedy's "liberal martyr" image to an obnoxious degree: modern viewers will snicker at Farrington's proclamation that he couldn't unearth any "dirt" on Kennedy's private life. The film never sells a skeptical viewer on the scheme's plausibility: I guess for '70s audiences it was self-evident that big businessmen wielded infinite power to hire assassins, fake evidence and cover up crimes indefinitely. On the other hand, the conspiracy remains consistent, avoiding the messy self-contradiction and incredulity of JFK's theories. Its clipped, straightforward style is pleasantly reminiscent of (if less refined than) the same year's The Day of the Jackal, and Executive Action provides acceptable fiction, if not believable speculation.

David Miller was a competent director with an interesting resume (including Flying Tigers, Lonely are the Brave), but here his direction is flat and perfunctory. Despite using real Dallas locations and a few name stars, the movie looks cheap, and long exposition scenes render the film dramatically inert. George Grenville's editing is top-notch, especially a montage intercutting a lecture on historical assassinations and snipers target-shooting. Miller's mixing real footage with recreations definitely presages Stone's frenetic tactics, but with more restraint.

The acting is functional rather than flashy. Stars Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Will Geer (In Cold Blood) do little more than spout exposition at the audience. John Anderson (Ride the High Country) plays a government official involved in the plot. Walter Brooke (The Graduate), Ed Lauter (The Longest Yard) and Dick Miller (The Terminator) can be spotted among the assassins.

Executive Action isn't bad, achieving respectability through restraint. But it lacks dramatic punch and finesse, and mostly serves as a crude rough drafts for one of the masterpieces of paranoid cinema.