Released in November 1973 on the tenth anniversary of the JFK assassination, the film stars Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer.

Instead, Executive Action is told from the standpoint of the conspirators, and the audience watches them carry out the JFK assassination in a methodical, businesslike manner.

At a June 1963 gathering in the palatial home of Robert Foster, shadowy figures from American industry, politics, and intelligence discuss their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration.

Foster and the others try to persuade Harold Ferguson, a powerful oil magnate dressed in white, to back their plans for Kennedy's assassination.

Foster's fellow conspirator James Farrington, a black-ops specialist, labels this an "executive action" (the intelligence term for assassinating a head of state).

Farrington explains that these actions were carried out by alleged lone fanatics (later scenes show the grooming process unwittingly undergone by Lee Harvey Oswald to fulfill the lone-fanatic role in the JFK assassination).

He adds that "the best chance for success would be to act during a motorcade, because they are always planned well in advance, allow for firing from three angles under cover and provide clean escapes during the following confusion.

After a subsequent meeting, several of the conspirators discuss their paranoid fears about the future of the U.S. under the Kennedy brothers, and the imperiled security of ruling-class whites across the globe.

[10] Sutherland planned to act in and produce Executive Action, but he was compelled to abandon the project after failing to obtain studio financing, and ended up taking a role in another film.

"[10] In a 1991 retrospective article about Executive Action, Andy Marx wrote:Once the film went into production, Lane and Freed tried to point out certain parts of Trumbo's script they disagreed with, but found themselves barred from the movie set.

[12] Steve Jaffe, an investigator who had worked with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, was the film's technical consultant and supervising producer.

The day after Executive Action opened, The New York Times reported that National General Pictures had filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against NBC.

The lawsuit alleged that the NBC-affiliated New York City station, WNBC-TV, breached an agreement with National General by cancelling a promotional commercial for Executive Action.

The station objected to two particular images as "too violent": (1) the president in an open limousine being viewed through a telescopic gunsight, and (2) "a scene in which a marksman is shown firing practice shots at a target in the desert.

"[17] In contrast, The New York Times gave it a positive review, with Nora Sayre writing that the film "offers a tactful, low-key blend of fact and invention.

"[19] Ebert stated, "There’s something exploitative and unseemly in the way this movie takes the real blood and anguish and fits it neatly into a semi-documentary thriller.

The film is also available on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movie, and Fandango at Home.

"[7]: 463–465 Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, estimated that the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren Commission index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40, would be 98.16 percent, or one out of 1.2.