A tense, well-acted little film, co-written by McCarthy-era blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. Presents an entirely plausible scenario around the 1963 assassination of JFK, complete with unsavory CIA types and villainous Right-Wing millionaires. Burt Lancaster plays the veteran government spook, who puts it all together under the circumspect but watchful eye of Robert Ryan. There is an excellent (and chilling) scene in which Ryan lays out the "future" of US government covert actions. "There'll be 20 billion people on the planet by the Year 2000," he intones: "Pouring out of Asia and Africa, all hungry, all determined to love. We have ways of reducing that population to less than 500,000; I've seen the figures." When his companion (Lancaster) demurs ("We sound like God reading from the Doomsday Book"), Ryan shrugs. "Well, someone's got to do it. And the methods and techniques we develop now will help us control our own troublesome populations - blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, poverty-prone Whites." It is a terrifying sequence, filmed nearly a decade before the scourge of the AIDS virus, which many believe was ultimately created to target "troublesome populations". An all-around compelling movie.