On the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Cinema Retro columnist Graham Hill addresses the debate over the most famous murder of the 20th century - and how the 1973 film Executive Action dared to suggest a conspiracy.
by Graham Hill
When the very subject of conspiracy is brought up in
polite conversation these days, it’s usually aimed at the policies and
administration of whoever happens to be in power. And since Vietnam, Watergate, 9-11 and the
whole Iraq War issue, conspiracy in itself is not as far-fetched and
dismissible as an Elvis or UFO sighting would be. Almost a half-century after the event, over 70% of Americans still believe there
was a conspiracy in the death of President John F. Kennedy. Those who dismiss the conspiracy theory, in essence, believe:
·     Â
the official Warren Commission report
conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy
·     Â
that the single “magic†bullet did all the
damage and was found pristine on the hospital stretcher
·     Â
that the bullet could have only come from
the Texas Schoolbook Depository to the rear, when so many witnesses and the
infamous Zapruder film show indicate Kennedy being fatally hit from the front
·     Â
that an ex-marine, who just so happens to
speak fluent Russian and who also monitored the U-2’s over Russia and knew all
classified codes and call signs for NORAD, could afford to fly to the Soviet
Union and receive a precious visa to enter the country, then renounce his U.S.
citizenship; then marry a KGB colonel’s daughter and be allowed to return to
the U.S.
·      that the Dallas police department could issue
an APB under Oswald’s name, coupled with a full description,  less than fifteen minutes after the
assassination
·      that when Oswald was captured, the police
kept no transcript or record of  his time
in custody
·     Â
that so many material witnesses could
coincidentally suffer fatal accidents
Whether you believe conspiracy one way or another, the
1973 movie Executive Action makes a
case for one, or at the very least the possibility for one –and it makes it
beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.
Unlike Oliver Stone’s overfed and over-budgeted JFK, director David Miller’s and
producer Edward Lewis’ lean and thrifty Executive
Action has, over time, been proven right in its assumptions and organized
conspiracy suggestions.The movie’s
release came within days of the tenth anniversary of that sad day in Dallas,
Texas of November 22nd, 1963 at approximately 12.30 pm central time.You could say it was another organized
conspiracy to get the movie made at all, one orchestrated by Lewis and
co-producers Dan Bessie and Gary Horowitz, using an effective and a
groundbreaking technique of combining the Zapruder film, actual newsreel
footage, added sound effects and blending it all seamlessly with the suggested
re-enactment written by legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.The famed writer
was no stranger to government conspiracies, having been blacklisted in the 1950’s
for refusing to testify and name names before the House on Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC). Surprisingly,
when Trumbo was first approached by his Spartacus
collaborator and producer Edward Lewis, he was skeptical of any hint of a
conspiracy or that Oswald could be innocent of the crime. However, after seeing
the research and reading the book written by Donald Freed and Mark Lane -Executive Action: Assassination of a Head of
State -Trumbo came away believing that certain high officials in the
government, intelligence community, organized crime and big business could have
come together to change world history with the most audacious homicide of the
twentieth century. Â
Mark Lane, who is also an attorney, public speaker and
a human rights advocate, was one of the first to challenge the Warren
Commission report and became a pioneer in what has now become an industry in
JFK assassination theories. In 1967 he wrote Rush to Judgment and hosted a TV documentary based on his book. The
term “executive action†-or covertly assassinating a head of state, originated
with the CIA in the 1950’s. Remember
–years ago, people believed whole heartedly in their government. It was this optimistic, if not totally naive
Frank “Capraesque†view, that the American people would never consider for a single
second that the United States could order the killing of foreign politicians or
heads of state, let alone domestic ones.
It was actors Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster and
Robert Ryan, all well known Hollywood liberals, who first approached producer
Edward Lewis with Freed’s and Lane’s Executive
Action book. The equally liberal
Lewis, was a personal friend of Lancaster, having produced The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964) and The
Gypsy Moths (1969) in which the iconic sixty year-old actor had starred in.  Lancaster believed in this project
and felt it was an alarming story that needed to be told, especially since the
revelations of the on-going Vietnam War and Watergate scandals were so fresh on
everyone’s minds. Sutherland didn’t get
to be in this movie, but he later would be featured in an impressive cameo role
in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). Lancaster was the sole reason the film was
getting made at all and, between May and June of 1973, filming took place and at
a fast pace in Los Angeles, as well as in a house in Pasadena that was well known to fans
of TV’s Batmanas Wayne Manor.  Other locations included  Vasquez Rocks, just north of Hollywood and
downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma doubling for 1963 Dallas and the real assassination
site -Dealey Plaza. Â With a TV budget of
just under $1 million, Executive Action,
under the capable direction of David Miller (Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Captain Newman M.D. (1963)) presented
a scenario that has a Texas arch anti-communist oil millionaire played by real-life
liberal and ex-blacklisted actor Will Geer, financing and giving the go-ahead
to kill JFK.Years later, documentary
producer Nigel Turner, in his highly praised and controversial series The Men Who Killed Kennedy, offered
evidence that it could have been Texas oil mogul and wheeler-dealer Clint Murchison,
who financed the hit.As is still common
today, ex-CIA and FBI agents ended up working for industrialists and major
corporations as security operatives. It
is widely believed that it would have been  easy for someone as rich, resourceful and
powerful as Murchison to get the presidential motorcade to make a pointless
turn into Dealey Plaza for the sole purpose of trapping the President in a killing
field of triangulated fire. Robert Ryan, in the last film role of his great
career, plays an ex-military/corporate security head who -along with his
operations chief Burt Lancaster- convinces Geer that if Kennedy is not stopped
by “executive actionâ€, the communists will advance, empowered minorities will riot, corporate taxes will
rise and profits will fall – all the result of Kennedy’s liberal social agenda..
Despite the movie’s low budget, which saw major stars
like Lancaster and Ryan working for scale, Hollywood’s casting dean the
legendary Lynn Stalmaster and his wife Lea, rounded up a great supporting cast
of veteran character actors.The DVD includes a featurette on the making of the
picture shot during its actual production.Â
Producer Edward Lewis comes right out and says he received death threats
over the course of the project. There
was resistance from both Washington and Hollywood. No major studio was interested
in either financing or releasing it. Finally,
a small distributor called National General Pictures, which came about in 1967
and had released such films as Monte
Walsh (1970), The Getaway (1972), The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
and Prime Cut (1972), braved the
political and economic climate and took a chance in presenting the first motion
picture depiction of an event that many influential and powerful people would
sooner see forgotten.
Burt Lancaster as one of the chief conspirators
Lee Harvey Oswald was to be the “patsy†from the very
beginning. The movie heavily suggests
Oswald was totally innocent, an ex-marine believed to be working for the CIA,
but also known to Naval Intelligence and the FBI as an informant. Thinking that he was on assignment infiltrating
a plot to kill Kennedy, the problem was that the very people he was reporting
to were the very ones running it.He was
set-up in the Dallas schoolbook depository and -the film theorizes - a look-a-like was used to shoot Dallas
police officer J.D. Tippit. Lancaster
contracts for multiple assassin teams to train and execute the mission. These are men he has worked with and trusted
before in mercenary and “black-opsâ€. We
see them training in the desert, timing their shots and perfecting their
accuracy, using the very inadequate Italian military Mannlicher-Carcano
bolt-action rifle that would implicate Oswald.Â
The planned scenario called for Oswald to be killed as the “lone nutâ€
assassin and- failing that- Â he would not
live to be tried in court. Through the
co-operation of the Mafia, strip club owner Jack Ruby was obliged to kill him.
The framing of Oswald is well shown, having his head pasted on and airbrushed
to the incriminating rifle photo, being filmed on the streets of New Orleans as
a Cuban-communist sympathizer and so on.Â
As you would imagine, the most vivid and attention-grabbing aspects of Executive Action show the assassination
itself through the inter-cutting between the sniper teams and the Zapruder film
footage. The Warren Commission declared
there were only three shots fired, the first injuring Kennedy in his upper
back, the second or possibly third shot –the “magic bulletâ€- fatally hitting
Kennedy exiting his neck and proceeding on into Governor John Connally, seated
in front. And there was one shot that
missed altogether, hitting the curb  -
all presumably fired by Oswald in literally just a few seconds. Both
documentaries Reasonable Doubt: The Single-
Bullet Theory (1988) and the nine-part The
Men Who Killed Kennedy series prove the absurdity of the commission’s
claims. But of course there are other
documentaries that support the single-bullet theory –you’ll have to make up
your own mind either way. Needless to
say, if you believe the “single-bullet theory†you’ll totally dismiss Executive Action -just like the public
and critics did in November 1973, when it was first released. However, it was better received in Europe and
the rest of the world, where audiences were naturally more responsive to
conspiracies in light of just how many there have been proven in world history.
 Speaking of which, distributor National
General Pictures, coincidentally or  mysteriously, never released any more movies
after Executive Action and years
later would be bought by Warner Brothers, around the time that they were
coincidentally about to release their version of the assassination –a movie
called JFK!
The subject of the JFK assassination and conspiracy,
even now raises fierce debate. There are still people who believe the Warren
Report – and these are probably the same folks who also  believe Robert Kennedy’s assassination was
un-related and just the work of another “lone nutâ€. They probably also still
believe that there really were weapons of mass destruction all along in Iraq!
(E mail Graham Hill at  grahamhill007@sbcglobal.net)