movies that will be showing up over the vacation, but that will have to
wait until next week at the earliest.
This week on campus, in the meantime, we find the John Ford
senes bnnging that late, great director’s 1937 classic The Hurricane
to 177 Lawrence at 8 tonight, November 29. The film stars Jon HaU and
Dorothy Lamour in one of her earliest sarong pictures, and includes
what many believe to be the greatest storm sequence ever filmed.
On Sunday, the Cultural Forum brings that 1939 box-office biggie
Gone With The Wind, to campus for the first time, for showings at 3
p.m. and 8p.m. in the EMU. This multiply-honored epic—Oscars for
best film, director, screenplay, actress (Vivien Leigh), supporting
actress (Hattie McDaniel), color cinematography, and editing—was
the longest film ever made at its first release. About the only person
not to get a major award for his efforts was Clark Gable, whose Rhett
Butler is for many people the most memorable aspect of the movie.
The weekend is really dominated, however, by the showing on
three consecutive nights of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 feature, The Circus.
The Film Society will present this rarely seen classic, made between
The Gold Rush and City Lights, on Friday and Saturday at 7 and 9 in
150 Science, and on Sunday at 8 in the University Theatre. TTie Friday
and Saturday showings will be open to the public and to Chaplin series
ticket holders on the same basis as previous showings, but the Sunday
show will be available to Film Society members on their Society
tickets in addition to the others.
Pierre G. Dunn
film
Executive Action’ no thriller-it’s a dud
And nothing can we call our own but
death.
And that small model of the barren
. .earth.
V\ hich serves as paste and cover for our
bones;
For God's sake, let us sit upon the
ground.
And tell sad stories of the death of
kings...
Shakespeare.
King Richard II
Let's not. If our tales are not better than the graceless tribute paid
John Kennedy in the new film Executive Action, let’s just get drunk and
forget the whole thing.
The dud in question, which has been playing for two weeks at the
Mayflower, is a fictionalization of the assassination of JFK, in which
director David Miller and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo attempt to ad
vance a plausible account of certain imaginary conspiratorial dealings
which may have led to the disaster in Dallas. But the disaster here proves
to be the entire project; the film has so many things wrong with it that it’s
taken me all of 10 days to enumerate and sort them, thereby depriving
many people of the early warning to which they are, God knows, entitled.
Executive Action finds three big businessmen (Burt Lancaster,
Robert Ryan. Will Greer) employing much effort, hard cash, and pull to
assassinate Kennedy, who has of late spoken unfavorably of the oil
depletion allowance, failed to lean hard enough on the Vietnamese, and
'to their eyes) groomed brothers Bob and Ted as his successors. The
t hree hire a trio of sharpshooters for the deed, locate an Oswald look-alike
to frame the real Oswald, and have the whole shebang very neatly tied up
through the timely intervention of Accident, in the person of Jack Ruby.
With Kennedy, Oswald and Ruby permanently out of the picture, and the
assassins voluntarily exiled to Europe and fat Swiss bank accounts, the
tycoons relax over a friendly game of billiards, and the contemplation of
better days coming.
J Sunday *?itm
6<f @tttCuMU
GONE
WITH THE
WIND
December 2
EMU BALLROOM
3 p.m. & 8 p.m.
SI .00
It’s at just this point that Miller, Trumbo, et al provide us with a
distinctly bizarre denouement which tells where the real emphasis of this
stillborn picture should have been all along: the photos of eighteen
material witnesses to the assassination are flashed, together with the
information that all had died violently by mid-1967, and that the odds
against this happening were a respectable 1,000 trillion to one.
Who were they? What did they see? And why weren’t they in the
picture? What the creators of Executive Action have spumed here is an
opportunity of untold dramatic possibility, a circumstantial mesh which
positively begs for the kind of conjecture which Miller and his ac
complices instead divert to an assassination scheme whose success is
assumed from the outset, since the assassination’s an established fact.
Not much suspense there, you can bet—they’ll kill him sure. Worse,
they’ll do it without interpersonal conflicts, twinges of conscience, or any
undue hassle over technical matters. These excluded elements don’t
accord, it seems with writer Trumbo’s conception of character.
And they don’t accord with my conception of a good thriller. The odds
against a shambles like Executive Action holding anyone over 12 in thrall
are about 1,000 trillion to one. If the guys who put it together are so up on
statistics, they should’ve known that from the beginning.
Chris Hougium
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