svenerik-palmbring

Based on a novel by Mickey Spillane in atomic shape this is a great thriller to watch. The story is build up around the search for the great "whatsit". The tempo is high in this dark and intriguing story. Ralph Meeker does a high class performance as Spillane's tough private eye, Mike Hammer. Add to that a wonderful lineup of great character-actors like: Albert Dekker, Strother Martin, Percy Helton, Jack Elam and Paul Stewart. There are also some amazing cars and beautiful women. Great entertainment, directed by one of the true masters of the trade: Robert Aldrich. As a bonus we can hear the man with the velvet voice, the unforgettable Nat Kong Cole sing.

A story that raises many questions, even good ones, but gives only a few answers. A great cast, James Wilby is for example excellent as Tony Last, goes to work in this beautifully filmed melodrama set in the early thirties i UK and Brazil. The period feeling is great and so are the settings. The story is built up around a doomed marriage, but it is hard to really understand why. There is a lot of smoke here but no real fire until the late and great Sir Alec Guiness comes to work in the last 30 minutes creating a frightening illiterate fan of Charles Dickens. But superb acting on all hands and high class camera-work is not enough although the film is worth watching especially if you have a love for British culture and history, and don't we all...

David Miller was not what you call an auteur director, but a very qualified and professional filmmaker, and that is good enough in my book ,due to the fact that I write from Ingmar Bergman land. Miller was the man behind for example: Lonely Are the Brave, Sudden Fear, Billy The Kid(1941) and many other films. In Executive Action Miller made a professional job about a probably professional "job", the killing of a president. There are so many theories about what really happened that fateful Novemberday down in Dallas in The Lone Star State. Take your pick ! Dalton Trumbo wrote a good script based on some of them, of course with the bottom line: Oswald was not alone. It is no secret that a president has many and often powerful enemies, that goes with the job. You can speculate about Cubans, oil magnates, the Mob and so on, but the crucial point in the film and maybe in real life is that the official story, outlining Lee H. Oswald as the only one who took executive action that day is not easy to believe. If so, he fired three shots in six seconds,and made the last one good. But documentary pictures show that the presidents head is thrown back when the last shot hits, which tells us that the third shot probably came in front. Executive action is a tight and well made thriller based on this hypotheses, about a conspiracy.You might even say that the more famous JFK(D: Oliver Stone) is based on Miller's film. JFK is longer and more visually vibrant and on the whole a more flamboyant production, but Miller's film deserve a better reputation. Maltins for example calls it a "bomb", and that is poor judgement from someone who should know better.

The cast is also superb, Burt Lancaster especially is good as the mastermind planning it all. And it is of course always a pleasure to watch Robert Ryan, an old pro and a no nonsense actor, always with integrity and a "know how" in his roles.If you want to see a real good thriller, regardless of your own thoughts about a president's death, you are on with Executive Action.