David Miller directed Executive Action, a conspiracy thriller about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, written by Dalton Trumbo, Mark Lane, and Donald Freed, starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan.
Miller had previously worked with the blacklisted Trumbo (one of the Hollywood Ten), on the Western Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas in his all-time favorite part.
A narrator states that, when asked about the Kennedy Assassination and the Warren Commission report, President Lyndon B. Johnson said that he doubted the Commission’s findings. That segment did not actually run on TV– it was cut from a TV program about Johnson at his own request.
At a gathering in June 1963, some shadowy industrial, political and US intelligence figures are seen discussing their dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration.
Robert Foster (Robert Ryan) and Farrington (Lancaster) express their paranoid fears about the future of the country under the young and energetic Kennedy, and over the security of the white ruling-class across the globe.
Foster forecasts that the world population in 2000 would stand at 7 billion, composed of mostly non-white people, “swarming out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America.”
As news of the assassination reaches the conspirators, Foster states that “Bobby Kennedy is not thinking as Attorney General, but as a grieving brother, and by the time he recovers, it will be too late.”
The conspirators hold that people will believe in their made-up story because “they want to.”
However, soon after, Farrington dies of heart attack at Parkland Hospital.
In the end, the conspirators are insulated from their link to the group that had committed the killings.
Spoiler Alert
A photo collage of 18 material witnesses is shown, but only two of them died of unnatural causes within the three years after the assassination.
In a voice-over, we learn that the British newspaper “The Sunday Times” had mentioned that the probability for all people who witnessed the assassination would die within that period of time to be 100,000-trillion-to-one.
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
Note:
TCM showed this movie on April 23, 2020.
