Word: trumbo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Screenplay by DALTON TRUMBO and LORENZO SEMPLE...
Directed by DAVID MILLER Screenplay by DALTON TRUMBO...
...happens, in Executive Action, like a low-grade, seedy shoot-'em-up. Dalton Trumbo's script is based on a story written in part by Mark Lane, the lawyer and assassination-conspiracy buff. Real names of persons and places are used except where they would be most crucial. The conspirators-Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer and John Anderson among them-are assigned fictional names, but only the vaguest identides. Ryan, the force behind the plot, is wealthy; Lancaster apparently is a maverick intelligence operative; Geer, an elderly man who has oil interests. Such sketchiness satisfies the requirements...
...this were a film about another assassination-say, a plot to kill the board chairman of a large corporation-the tedium of Miller's direction, the dry rot of Trumbo's writing, would quickly do it in. Instead, the movie is kept going by the baleful novelty of being about Kennedy. Whatever factual points the movie might have made are inextricably mixed up in trappings that would have seemed awkward even in a creaky TV series like Foreign Intrigue. The existence of a double for Oswald is not made even dramatically credible; yet the movie and the assassination...
Among the latter, the best-known group was the Hollywood Ten, an oddly assorted collection of men who went to jail for refusing to testify about their political beliefs. They included Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), one of the highest-paid screenwriters in town, and Ring Lardner Jr. (Forever Amber), one of the most talented. The rest were largely fringe figures, creators of Charlie Chan and Boston Blackie epics, who as writers and directors probably could never have earned anything like the fame they won collectively in political martyrdom...