Warner Brothers has announced a "Signature Collection" boxed set dedicated to the films of Burt Lancaster. The five title set includes The Flame and the Arrow, Jim Thorpe-All American, His Majesty O'Keefe and South Sea Woman. These are all mid-range titles, but most welcome as they are making their DVD debuts - and one cannot have enough of Lancaster in his prime. However, the most interesting aspect of the set is the inclusion of the granddaddy of all JFK conspiracy movies, Executive Action. The 1973 film stirred up minor controversy by theorizing that President John F. Kennedy had been marked for murder by conservative oil barons who loathed his liberal policies and who felt the nation (and their fortunes) were being placed in jeopardy. The film didn't generate nearly as much controversy as Oliver Stone's JFK did two decades later - perhaps because, unlike Stone's indulgence in revisionist history, the makers of Executive Action had the intellectual honesty to admit the screenplay was a work of fiction supported by carefully studied inconsistencies in the Warren Report. Stone's acclaimed and very competently made film masqueraded as a historical record of the events, despite the fact that many of the story elements and characters were entirely fictionalized. Stone, who senses a government conspiracy every time his choice for American Idol is voted off, defended his film by saying that he is a filmmaker, not a historian and thus was allowed to indulge in artistic license -thus sidestepping the central argument that his film did not provide any context for younger or more naive viewers to realize the extent of the "artistic license" he employed.
Executive Action boasts an excellent cast with Lancaster the ringleader of the "patriots" who seek to assassinate a U.S president. Among his co-stars: Robert Ryan and Will Gear. That's right, the avuncular Grandpa Walton schemes to commit the ultimate act of treason. The film is crude by the standards of the production values afforded Stone's movie but is nonetheless engrossing throughout. Look for a review here when the set is released in October.
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