Classic Film Guide

Burt Lancaster: The Signature Collection

Executive Action (1973) - this political thriller purports to provide an alternative to the Warren Commission’s report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Directed by David Miller, it features a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo that was based on the story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane’s novel Rush to Judgment. It stars Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan (among others) as wealthy conspirators that want to eliminate the POTUS before he and the rest of the Kennedy clan - they foresee the White House being occupied by JFK, then Robert followed by Teddy through 1984 - can implement their agenda, which would change the United States of America into an intolerable country for them. Actual newsreel footage is used to chronicle the President’s steps: a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the promise of equal rights for Negroes (Kennedy’s words), and military withdrawal from Vietnam, which the conspirators fear would allow the Communists to take over Asia. The actions finally convince a Southerner (played by Will Geer) to fund the assassination plot which, according to the film, included three gunmen (one behind a fence on a grassy knoll), and making a patsy out of Oswald, who was merely a Texas School Book Depository employee when the shots rang out near Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas at half past noon on that fateful day. After Jack Ruby kills Oswald, the film’s denouement includes Ryan receiving a phone call that Lancaster’s character has died, then pictures of several other eyewitnesses (who were reportedly killed or died mysteriously in subsequent years) are shown. A conspiracy theorist’s delight!

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The Flame and the Arrow (1950) - is a Technicolor action adventure drama from Warner Bros. that attempts to recapture the magic of their earlier Errol Flynn features, like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), utilizing Burt Lancaster in the title role. While former acrobat Lancaster was perfect for the role’s demanding physicality, especially when teamed with Nick Cravat (who worked with the actor in his previous profession, and did in several other films as well), too much of this movie’s story was borrowed from the others, making this one less compelling to anyone who’s familiar with the previous films. It did earn a Best Color Cinematography Oscar nomination for Ernest Haller (Gone With the Wind (1939)), and its Max Steiner Score was also nominated. Directed by Jacques Tourneur and written by Waldo Salt, the cast also includes Virginia Mayo as the privileged damsel who (somehow) understands and sympathizes with the plight of the impoverished (and falls in love with the hero), and Robert Douglas (who’d battled Flynn in Adventures of Don Juan (1948)) as the aristocrat that’s supposed to marry her and later fights Dardo (Lancaster, an archer dubbed "the Arrow"). Aline MacMahon plays Dardo’s mother (a part that seems unnecessary), and Frank Allenby plays the chief villain - the greedy Count Ulrich aka The Hawk, who’d wooed away Dardo’s wife (Lynn Baggett) five years earlier; she now wants their son (Gordon Gebert), who’d been living with his outdoorsman father. This is the primary source of conflict in lieu of Ulrich’s oppressive taxation, though taxes are the reason there’s an early alliance between Dardo and Douglas’s character. Cravat plays Dardo’s mute sidekick Piccolo and Norman Lloyd plays a troubadour, the most interesting of the merry band of men that live in the mountains (not forests) with Dardo. Francis Pierlot and Victor Kilian also appear as town elders.

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His Majesty O’Keefe (1954) - is an average albeit unusual action adventure drama set in the South Seas (it was filmed on the Fiji islands) of the Pacific Ocean which stars Burt Lancaster, and hundreds of island natives; additional support is provided by Joan Rice, André Morell, Abraham Sofaer, Archie Savage, Benson Fong, and Philip Ahn (among others). It was directed by Byron Haskin, who’d won a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy in 1939 and had received four Oscar nominations for his Special Effects work earlier in his career, and was written by Borden Chase (Red River (1948)) and James Hill from a novel by Gerald Green and Lawrence Klingman. In the 1870s, coconut oil is a valuable resource which is derived from the dried meat or copra of the fruit. Lancaster plays a sea captain - the titled O’Keefe - and would-be copra trader that finds himself on the island of Yap after his hungry overworked crew were driven to mutiny by his greedy but unfulfilled quest. Yap is wrought with palm trees filled with coconuts that the local representative of a German trading company Alfred Tetins (Morell) has been unable to have harvested for the two decades that he’s lived there. It seems that the native islanders can’t be motivated to work; their only interest lies in FEI, large round stones that can only be obtained through great human cost from a distant island. Upon returning to Hong Kong, O’Keefe finds an unlikely partner in dentist Ahn, whose nephew (Fong) becomes the captain’s first mate. When the crew of O’Keefe’s "new" junk is near starvation, they happen upon the island where the Yap natives mine the FEI. It’s there that O’Keefe meets the lovely daughter of an Englishman (Rice); while he doesn’t force the captain to marry her, a shotgun wedding was initially threatened (later, a Hong Kong wedding is thrown for the couple by the dentist). Using gunpowder, O’Keefe shows the Yap medicine man (Sofaer) how much faster the FEI can be mined. This leads to a conflict between two tribal leaders, one (Savage) who believes that the traditional way of obtaining the stones in the only way and another (Tessa Prendergast) who strikes a trade agreement with O’Keefe. Naturally, the Germans that employ Tetins and a pirate, aptly named Bully (Charles Horvath), aren’t too happy with the arrangement. After Bully burns the Yap’s huts and imprisons them, O’Keefe rescues the natives, who decide to make the captain their king.

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South Sea Woman (1953) - the early years of World War II is the setting for this action comedy starring Burt Lancaster, Virginia Mayo, and Chuck Connors (his biggest role to date). Directed by Arthur Lubin, it features an Edwin Blum screenplay from a William Rankin-Stanley Shapiro adaptation of William Rankin’s play. Lancaster plays Master Gunnery Sergeant James O'Hearn, whose court martial trial has just begun (Hayden Rorke plays the prosecutor and Cliff Clark is among the officers who sit in judgment). After a series of outlandish sounding charges are read, O'Hearn declines the opportunity to defend himself. However, his court appointed attorney (Bob Sweeney) will mount a defense anyway. A series of witnesses’ recall the events that lead to the charges, and flashbacks are used to tell their stories. Ginger Martin (Mayo in the title role) was a displaced showgirl in Southeast Asia that Marine Private Davey White (Connors) was to marry before his Sergeant and mentor O'Hearn intervened. A barroom brawl and their ensuing fight causes the men to miss their ship on its way to sea. Further circumstances keep the AWOL Marines, with Ginger in tow, from returning right away. In fact, for months they are stranded on a remote island commanded by Vichy French sympathizer Pierre Marchand (Leon Askin). After enjoying the pleasures of hotelier Lillie Duval (Veola Vonn) and her girls, O'Hearn learns that Dutch Captain van Dorck (Rudolph Anders) is really a Nazi that’s been placing radar equipment throughout the South Pacific. He then frees or convinces the real deserters, who have made the island their home (including Arthur Shields), to join his plan to steal van Dorck’s yacht, after which they discover and disrupt a Japanese invasion fleet by attacking it! The details of the battle and the outcome of the trial are intertwined; Strother Martin appears as a spectator.

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Jim Thorpe – All-American (1951) is an unremarkable sports biography about the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. For those not familiar with Thorpe and his athletic accomplishments, the first hour of the movie adequately covers the basics; for those unaware of his troubled personal life, the last 45 minutes conveys the spirit of his off-the-field difficulties if not an accurate historical account. Even though he appeared in nearly 60 films, primarily as an uncredited extra and frequently as an Indian (Native American), his Hollywood career is completely ignored. Burt Lancaster plays Thorpe energetically, and credibly given his physical talents, Charles Bickford plays the legendary 'Pop' Warner, Thorpe’s first coach (at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania) and mentor, and Phyllis Thaxter plays Thorpe’s first wife Margaret (Iva in real life); Thorpe’s other wives and children other than the fated Jim Jr. are never mentioned. Though he hadn’t played organized sports before attending Carlisle, Thorpe was a natural who excelled at every one he tried including track and field, football and baseball. After leading his college football team to a championship, he went on to win both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden though he was later stripped of these titles and had to return his medals after it was learned that he’d played baseball for money during one summer while at Carlisle (70 years later, these honors were reinstated). No longer an amateur, Thorpe played professional baseball before, as its star player, he helped to establish what is now known the National Football League. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz and written (and/or adapted from Thorpe's biography with Russell Birdwell) by its producer Everett Freeman, Frank Davis (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)) and Douglas Morrow (The Stratton Story (1949)), among others. Steve Cochran plays a rival come friend of Thorpe’s and Nestor Paiva appears uncredited as Thorpe’s father in the opening sequences on the Oklahoma reservation where Jim was raised.

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