Seven Days in May
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
One of the things that you see so resolutely in John Frankenheimer’s thrillers is how he uses close-ups to build suspense. The way he captures faces during scenes of increased tension is one of the reasons we feel the sense of tension in films like “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May.” The second of his ’60s paranoia trilogy, “Seven Days in May” is especially reliant on those close-ups because there’s no chase scenes or moments of manufactured tension in the script by Rod Serling, based on a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. This is a film of people talking, and finding their way to the truth of a situation through observations and dialogue; the most action-packed moments are an escape from a military base, and the setting up a sting on a potential fishing trip. That may not sound exciting, but in the hands of Serling and Frankenheimer, we’re with the film every step of the way.
This was my first time watching “Seven Days in May,” and seeing it in a time where a conspiracy theory about military intelligence disclosing information about a clandestine fight against the “Deep State” is one of the flashpoints for the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021 is a fascinating experience. Of course, the film was originally released in the year after the Kennedy assassination, itself a hot-bed of political conspiracy theorizing. I can only imagine watching this so close to the assassination, and it feeding into some of the conspiracies of that event with its story of military leaders who are planning a coup d’etat against the President because they disagree with his policies towards the Soviet Union. This is probably one of Oliver Stone’s favorite films.
Top-billed in this film is Burt Lancaster, who plays Gen. James Mattoon Scott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the first part of the film largely unfolds following Kirk Douglas’s Col. Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey, who is Scott’s Director. But the first thing we see are counter movements outside of the White House. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Russians, and some of those outside are protestors against the decision, and others are for the move. Before we go into the Oval Office, we see a fight break out between both groups, as accurate a reflection of the times as any, although it also reminded me of the Trump era of counter protests in his first year that culminated with the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017. Frankenheimer, gone since 2002, would have had plenty of material for more biting political thrillers if he was still around. Back to the story, though- we see how Lyman, while confident he made the right choice, is very aware of the blow-back he’s getting for the decision, and we see how it permeates through government. We then go to a congressional hearing where Scott and Casey are being questioned. Scott doesn’t trust the Russians to hold to the agreement, and as we follow him and Casey out of the hearing, we start to follow Casey, who gradually is confronted clues that Scott and some of the other Joint Chiefs are planning a military coup in the next week, with Scott building himself up to take control of the Presidency.
Serling was an interesting choice for the screenplay here, as well as a smart one. The way he built moral puzzles out of terrifying “What if?” scenarios on “The Twilight Zone” was a perfect warm-up for this thriller, where we are thrown into a fictional narrative that feels frighteningly plausible. In a way, “Seven Days in May” is touching on similar ideas of the paranoia of McCarthyism that “The Manchurian Candidate” did- with Casey being the equivalent of Marco in that film, the man in deep trying to uncover the truth- but the film is much more about the tension that arises when political leaders committed to peace are pushed back on from military leaders who think war is the best deterrent. I like how the failures of preventing Pearl Harbor loom large over this film, and Scott’s motivations- it provides he and those who support him an understandable, empathetic reason to be skeptical of the deal without simply painting them as nut jobs. I don’t know how whether the film is genuinely authentic- it does feel like a feature-length “Twilight Zone” episode- but the motivations the characters act with are very authentic, and that is all that matters.
The film becomes a game of chicken between Lyman and Scott, with Casey being one of the President’s men looking to uncover the truth. It leads him to the home of Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), a woman who might know enough to bury Scott. Does an act of treason demand blackmail to be countered and thwarted? That is one of the moral questions that comes into focus- if the President is a decent man, should he tarnish the name of a beloved military leader to stop a coup? The way the film focuses so much on its characters in its storytelling is one of the reasons “Seven Days in May” stays vital and alive, even as the Cold War is long behind us.
