Sunday 3 November 2013

JFK50: Executive Action (1973) by Dalton Trumbo

from Spike1138 on Vimeo.


'Executive Action' opened to a storm of controversy over the depiction of the assassination: in some places in the U.S., the film ran only 1 to 2 weeks in movie theaters or got pulled from them altogether.

The movie was part fiction, but it would contest other reports of the assassination, including the controversial Warren Commission report of 1964, which led to attacks against the film.

The trailers for the film never ran on certain television stations, including WNBC-TV in New York City. The criticism of the film and its suggestion of a Military-industrial complex conspiracy led to the film being removed totally from the movie theaters by early December 1973 and getting no TV/Video runs until the 1980s and mid-1990s, when it got legal release and distribution for TV and video.

The film was originally released on November 7, 1973, almost two weeks before the tenth anniversary of the JFK Assassination.



"Already the gentlemen of this Committee and others of like disposition have produced in this capital city a political atmosphere which is acrid with fear and repression; a community in which anti-Semitism finds safe refuge behind secret tests of loyalty; a city in which no union leader can trust his telephone; a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize one another in public places: a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and in the open air. 

You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire. 

For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there a the smell of smoke in this very room."


Dalton Trumbo,
Closing Statement, 
House Unamerican Activities Committee,

1947












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