Burt also nailed it in Executive Action, which is not overplayed here. It was in Europe.
Executive Action | Rotten Tomatoes
Yeah, that movie sucked. Lancaster was pretty good in it though.
A funny story involving me and this “film”. At the end of the movie is a rather gripping pre-credit epilogue: It has 18 picutures arrayed in what I can only call “yearbook style”--rows and columns. But instead of smiling kids, they show a bunch of alleged witnesses to the assassination: A somber voice comes on (I think it’s the guy from Forensic Files). The epilogue starts with the camera showing like one picture then pans back to show the 18 folks or whatever and the voice comes on....""In the three years after the murders of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, eighteen material witnesses died... six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks and two from natural causes. An actuary, engaged by the Sunday London Times concluded that on November 22, 1963, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, 1967 were one hundred thousand trillion to one."
Of course what the guy doesn’t tell you is that if you were to take 18 people out of Yankee Stadium who watched the Yanks advance yesterday,and they were in the 60’s and 70’s and track them for 3 years, you’d likely find 18 folks who died and the odds of them dying would be about the same.
Anyway, here’s the story. In a pre-internet and almost pre Blockbuster era, I was penning a masterpiece for my social studies class about JFK being assassinated and I remembered seeing this gripping “bombshell” at the end of the movie. I knew that Channel 13 in Houston was going to re-air this movie so I needed to record the stat at the end. This would be my show-stopper!!!! So I needed a video tape. I didn’t have one. But my brother was being conned by these real estate guys at the same time--Tom Vu (google this dude)--and he had bought a bunch of video tapes. I take one, record that 45 second blurb at the start of one of the tapes, transcribe the recording to paper, remove the tape I put over his tape to be able to record, then put the video tape back in it’s case and put it back in his closet. The crime of the century (my recording--not LHO killing Kennedy) was complete and I turn in my masterpiece.
Well (adopting my own Forensic Files voice),
in the 3 years after CandyCorn making a pirated video recording of a shitty film, the brother of Candy R. Corn became a conspiracy kook of his own buying into every crazy JFK conspiracy. One day while going back over the Tom Vu seminars, he watched video tape #1 and saw this “bombshell” on the video, sending him off into a tizzy. He came into my room and asked me to come into his to show me this. I cracked up. I had to tell him what I had done. But the look on his face...like he couldn’t believe that this lighning bolt of information would come out of nowhere to tell only him this evidence. He was unaware of the movie and had to find it. I think he actually bought a copy for like $60 which was big money for us back in the day. Another funny little story was that we were at the Movie Corner (an independent video rental place) in Sheldon, TX and saw the movie there on a wall with essentially all of Burt Landcaster’s movies--they were featuring him for some reason. Next to it was Twilights Last Gleaming. It quickly became my brother’s favorite movie based only on Lancasters’ intensity.
The movie itself billed itself as being one that would "clear the air" about the JFK assassination. Leonard Maltin opined that it was better at "clearing theaters" and it was a terrible flop. The only bit of truth in the entire movie was when an Oswald double (yup--the movie actually had a fake Oswald) told someone that if he was going to give the world an enema, he'd stick the nozzle in Dallas. I pretty much think anywhere in Texas would suffice but Dallas was a nice choice.
