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Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

It was hard back then to cut out Lee Harvey Oswald's face, paste it on a body holding a gun, and then copy it so it looked like a real photo. Made conspiracy challenging."Executive Action" from 1973 is another film that theorizes how the assassination of JFK went down - this time, it's a bunch of rogue intelligence agents, conservative politicians, greedy businessmen who were worried about President Kennedy's policies on race relations, ending the Vietnam War, and ending the oil depletion allowance. This film's conspiracy is a lot more straightforward than what was posited in JFK, and it really could have gone down this way - with fake Oswalds, three gunmen, and a lot of people getting out of Dodge as soon as it was over. Unfortunately we don't know what happened. This could be close though. Much of the film has actual footage mixed in with film footage. Although the assassination was a re- enactment, it was mixed with actual footage and is still devastating to watch.One thing I've never doubted for one minute is that Ruby was allowed to kill Oswald. Take a look at that scenario. This man supposedly just killed the President and Ruby saunters into the garage, Oswald comes up with a man at either side, walking somewhat slowly - where? Why wasn't the transport right at the door? Never could get over that."Executive Action" is handled in a very naturalistic style; the actors speak conversationally, and it makes what they're planning scarier.The most impressive part of the film is showing that 18 material witnesses to the assassination were dead by 1967. Sobering.Good film, makes you think. Depressing too.

If it's a given that infamous international events - like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - which have never been fully satisfactorily explained are fair game for conspiracy theorists then Executive Action has as much right as any other to its moment in the sun. The first obligation of any film expounding a conspiracy is plausibility and the movie asserts nothing that is beyond the capabilities of a well- to-highly organised group of like-minded people with virtually unlimited funds and access to a network of highly-skilled professional assassins. in saying this I may have underlined just a fraction of the difficulties faced by any group of fanatics who have no use for a democratic form of government. If we put this to one side we are left with some excellent performances. If Robert Ryan is the best actor overall by a country mile - and here I'm basing judgment on a lifetime career - then Burt Lancaster and Will Geer are certainly fit to be mentioned in the same breath. All in all a provocative and entertaining film.

Could Prescott Bush have been the right wing politician? Certainly the movie plays a pivotal role in convincing even some of its stars - Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan - that the plot line could have been very close to what did happen that fateful November when a President was gunned down under very mysterious circumstances. It also proves why one shooter had little chance of pulling it off, especially with the Italian Manlicher rifle, but "triangulated co- ordinated fire" could easily succeed. But, have you ever read the info sheet that came out with the movie? And how many witnesses dies within 3 years. And the enormous odds of that happening? Sais a great deal to me.

The film's thesis is that JFK was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy of wealthy men. In the title sequence, the producers admit that: "much of this film is fiction, much of it is also based on documented historical fact. Did the conspiracy we describe actually exist? We do not know. We merely suggest that it could have existed". In other words, the film's rationale is based on skepticism of the Warren Commission's lone-gunman theory.The three main characters, the villains, are Farrington (Burt Lancaster), Foster (Robert Ryan), and Ferguson (Will Geer), all suits, VIPs, presumably industrialists. But we're never told explicitly who they are or what they represent. Farrington is apparently the mastermind, the one who proposes that "the only possible (successful) scenario is three rifles with triangulated fire".Much of the dialogue consists of background information taken from historical government records related to Oswald and Kennedy's policies, and is therefore largely exposition. It's as if the film is giving viewers a history lesson. As a result, some of the dialogue sounds canned, scholastic, bookish.Casting is adequate. But acting is very, very wooden. Sometimes the cast acts like they're reading their lines off of cue cards.Color cinematography is conventional, though adequate. B&W newsreel footage of JFK, his speeches, the crowds that followed him, his arrival in Dallas, and Oswald permeates the film's plot, and gives the film a factual, semi-documentary look and feel. Some good aerial shots of Dealey Plaza lend authenticity to the story. And that moment when the motorcade enters the kill zone is quite dramatic, absent dialogue and music.Viewers who cling to the lone-gunman theory will hate this film. Viewers who believe in a conspiracy will probably prefer Oliver Stone's more recent, and more compelling film, "JFK" (1991). Back in the 1970s, "Executive Action" was the go-to film for those interested in this historical series of events. Now, the film seems very dated.