Pauline Kael's Review of "Executive Action"
- Fred Litwin
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
THE other new assassination film—”Executive Action,” a fictionalization of how President Kennedy might have been the victim of a large-scale right-wing plot—is so graceless it’s beyond using even as a demonstration of ineptitude. The failures of “The French Conspiracy” are the result of commercialization and so are instructive; the failures of “Executive Action” might be the result of sleeping sickness. In this account, the big, big businessmen who plot Kennedy’s death find an Oswald look-alike in order to frame Oswald—for reasons no one will ever understand. The picture, written by Dalton Trumbo from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane, and directed by David Miller (the low-budget Richard Fleischer), ends in perhaps the most ludicrous denouement in thriller history. We are presented with the faces of eighteen “material witnesses” who, we are told, have died, against odds of “one hundred thousand trillion to one.” But the movie has failed to introduce those witnesses into the action; we haven’t discovered what a single one of them witnessed or how he happened to get involved, so the end is as flat as the beginning and the middle. It’s a dodo bird of a movie, the winner of the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” prize—in miniature—for 1973, with matchlessly dull performances from a cast that includes Burt Lancaster (looking very depressed), Robert Ryan, and Will Geer. “Executive Action” could hardly be called a thriller, and it’s so worshipful of Kennedy (while treating him insensitively) as to seem to have no politics. David Miller, whose direction is merely halfhearted traffic management, has made a couple of dozen movies (such as “Love Happy,” “Captain Newman, M.D.,” “Hail, Hero!,” and, with Trumbo, the thickly ironic, overrated “Lonely Are the Brave”), so he doesn’t even have the freshness of amateurism. His approach appears to be low-key not by choice but by default; he gives no inkling that he has seen what other directors have been doing lately in the political-thriller form. “The French Conspiracy” is bad, but it isn’t stone-dead on the screen; it’s bad because it’s an ersatz political thriller. One can at least perceive what it aspires to be.
This is from the November 12, 1973 issue.
Money Quote:
It’s a dodo bird of a movie, the winner of the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” prize—in miniature—for 1973,
Here is Gene Siskel's review in the Chicago Tribune:
Money Quote:
And it is precisely on this point, as a conventional movie, that "Executive Action" stumbles badly. The script is so heavy-handed in its portrayal of the oilmen, in its representation of causality, that one might think it was written by a man with a very small shoulder under his chip. And it was. Dalton Trumbo, a tragic victim of the McCarthy-led Hollywood blacklist, lets his bitterness blunt his writing. His errors are elementary. In 1973, and especially in a movie with a subject and cause as serious as this one, you don't have a rich oilman, looking very much like a sinister Col. Sanders, sit in front of a television set, see Kennedy make a couple of predictable speeches, and only then agree to join the conspiracy. That's comic-book causality.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts
Leonard Maltin chimes in with a really fun review.
Executive Action: "A Shabby Fiction about JFK"
The New York Times reviews Executive Action.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Mark Lane
Lane cuts out a few of Reynolds' answers.
Sylvia Meagher was incensed at Lane's inclusion of this story in his film.
A good case study in Lane's intellectual dishonesty.
Robert Blakey and the HSCA were very critical of Mark Lane.
Mark Lane and the HSCA.
An interesting anecdote from Mort Sahl's book, Heartland.
Some ads for Lane's film Rush to Judgment.
A Garry Wills opinion piece on Mark Lane.
Navasky tests Lane's book and finds it wanting.
A New York Times profile of Lane and his involvement with Jonestown.
An apt profile.
An opinion piece by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times on Mark Lane and Jonestown.
An opinion piece from the Washington Post
A good opinion piece from the Philadelphia Bulletin.
Meagher tells Labro a story about Mark Lane.
Even a left-wing magazine like The Progressive found Mark Lane hard to take.
Mark Lane's addition to the 1992 edition of Rush to Judgment is eye opening.
Lane tells Dolan about Garrison's amazing evidence.
Lane makes a startling allegation.
A profile from Mother Jones magazine.
Lane and Meagher feuded about a blurb for her book.
A profile from Esquire Magazine.
An article from the Tampa Bay Times.
An Anthony Lewis column on Mark Lane from 1978.
Howard Roffman finds that Mark Lane's scholarship is lacking.
A profile of Mark Lane in Newsweek.
Mark Lane offers to introduce Jim Garrison to a witness that, for $25,000, would tie Jack Ruby with Clay Shaw.
This post has a good case study of how Mark Lane exploited a redaction in a document.
Lane tells the Danish press he knows who killed JFK.
Lane speaks at the Louisiana State Bar Association.