Seldom Seen review | EXECUTIVE ACTION

Taking cues from Mark Lane’s seminal examination of the Kennedy murder, “Rush to Judgment,” Action drops viewers into a series of clandestine meetings held by a fanatical group of business leaders (including Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and an excellent Will Geer) who are, in plain terms, discussing how to rid America of JFK’s progressive politics. Concurrently a team of marksmen train in the desert, practicing a series of maneuvers centered around hitting a lone moving target, with no idea who or what they’ll eventually be charged with firing upon. As the cabal pins down details of the operation, they find a patsy for their crime in the form of alleged Communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald. The events of November 22nd, 1963 unfold according to plan, and as the film closes a list of 18 material witnesses who died under strange – but fully documented – circumstances in the three years following the assassination is presented. The odds of those deaths randomly happening in that time span are given as having been calculated at one trillion to one, suggesting that the machine put in place to end Kennedy’s life continued churning even after he was laid to rest.

What’s most striking about Executive Action is its liberal use of archival footage, particularly in the film’s near-wordless third act, which crosscuts between real and staged materials with aplomb. Director David Miller’s work spanned six decades (and included the excellent Joan Crawford / Jack Palance noir Sudden Fear), however nothing else in his extensive filmography would seem to even remotely approach Action in terms of its progressive storytelling or mixed visual landscape.

Although it’s clear there wasn’t much cash infused into the production, the use of archival materials doesn’t appear to have been a cost-cutting measure. It pushes the film into a strange sort of ideological weigh-station between fiction, truth, polemic, and inquisition. The filmmakers and cast have, over the years, stressed they only intended to suggest an alternate scenario to the official “lone gunman” explanation. While not all aspects of Action jell to perfection (some of Dalton Trumbo’s dialog sticks square in the mud), the overall skill and conviction with which the picture was assembled leads one to believe the filmmakers genuinely felt they were onto something, even if that something was only an inkling of a larger problem within our democracy.

It’s that larger problem – that governments and a select few powerful private citizens can and often do dictate life instead of the electorate – that powers Action and, when considering the film in context, marks it as something which deserves to be evaluated by modern audiences. The idea that our government could, to any degree, be complicit in a plot to kill an elected official was unheard of save for the farthest corners of discussion leading up to and even following Kennedy’s death. It took a growing dissatisfaction (whether warranted or not; no sides taken here today) with the explanation for the death of a political luminary with a lifetime of work still ahead of him, coupled with the exposed corruption of Nixon’s presidency at the start of a new decade, to really flip that nebulous “conspiracy!” switch in the public’s collective brain.

Tragedy often breeds great art. Without the above-mentioned collective switch-flipping, the now lionized canon of paranoid ‘70s filmmaking (think out-and-out classics like The Conversation and All The President’s Men, to say nothing of lesser-known but still staggering anti-establishment tropes like God Told Me To and The Spook Who Sat by the Door) wouldn’t have come to pass. That isn’t to say Executive Action is great art – it isn’t. At times it’s slow and flawed. But it’s an early part of a ground swell of material which speaks so clearly of its generation, it can be a little overwhelming – especially when you consider what might be construed as material that speaks for our time today.

Beyond it ultimately being worthwhile filmmaking, Action deserves a re-release in order to be evaluated alongside its cinematic cousins focused on societal disintegration. Warner Brothers released the film in theaters and on video, but the rights now appear to rest with a company called Leisure Time Entertainment, about which little information could be found. It’s a shame Warner no longer holds Action’s rights, because in light of their propensity to raid their vaults in recent years (those wonderful classic western and noir box sets, as well as one-offs like Point Blank and Night Moves) you’d think they’d eventually come around to a re-release.

You may have your mind made up about what happened in Dallas; any way it – or any anomalous situation – is looked at, there’s no disputing the importance of always asking questions. Action does just that, and with considerable skill.