Executive Action ★★★

WITH the attempted assassination of Donald Trump still echoing, it’s fascinating to watch the 1973 thriller Executive Action.

It’s not the best directed film, in fact some scenes are a little amateur in their pacing and editing, but the context and story make up for these problems.

Even today, the controversial nature of US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination continues to reverberate in conspiracy theories across the internet.

So, it’s fascinating that this depiction of who was responsible for the murder, at odds with the official version of events, was released barely a decade after the actual assassination and 18 years before Oliver Stone’s seminal film JFK.

Executive Action also features two significant Hollywood actors, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, who chose to play pivotal characters involved in a business and government conspiracy behind the assassination.

The film presents the view that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and instead there were two other gunmen who fired the shots that killed the President on that fateful day in Dallas, Texas on 22 November in 1963.

Further, the other gunmen were former American military servicemen acting on behalf of major business and government figures who had reached the determination that some of the President’s major decisions could only be stopped by his death.

The film was co-written by Dalton Trumbo, not only one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters at the time but also one of the most well-known victims of the turbulent Blacklist era. It weaves much actual footage into the feature film to help maintain a sense of both authenticity and urgency.

But the most interesting scenes are those that posit the nature of the men who devised the assassination, their motivations and the organisation involved.

Ryan plays Robert Foster, who appears to be a highly-placed former Federal Government figure who maintains tentacles of intelligence and influence while Lancaster is James Farrington, a black-ops specialist used regularly by government, who is in charge of the planning, logistics of the murder.

In the opening scene they unsuccessfully try to persuade Harold Ferguson, a powerful oil magnate, to lend his finances and influence to their plot. In a series of discussions, the men describe their fears of a life in America under a President who espouses fairness and equal rights for all classes and creeds and an end to US military interference in world affairs.

In a simple but chilling later scene, Ferguson picks up the phone and gives his brief but definitive agreement to the plan after watching a news report suggesting the President is continuing to tolerate black civil rights actions, will shortly be withdrawing troops from Vietnam and plans to progress support for an international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

According to the film’s Wikipedia entry, the actor Donald Sutherland “has been credited as having conceived of the film… and planned to act in and produce but abandoned the project after failing to obtain financing.”

Sutherland would later play a ‘Deep Throat’ informant, known as Mr X, in one pivotal scene in Stone’s film in which the alleged assassination conspiracy is explained.

Fascinating stuff.

Watched on Apple TV.