SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

Director John Frankenheimer had an incredible run of bravura filmmaking in the early 1960s. Consider his output over a four year span from 1962 to 1966: BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962, his masterpiece), SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964), THE TRAIN (1964), SECONDS (1966) and GRAND PRIX (1966). Great films all and every one of them well worth seeing, as is most of the Frankheimer filmography, although if I were you, I'd take a pass on THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996) in which a bloated and incoherent Marlon Brando starred as "the island".

What's under review here today is SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, a brilliant political thriller that remains as fresh, bracing and, through a lens of more than fifty years, remarkably prescient with regards to the need to remove a sitting U.S. president from office. The original novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II was written in 1961 and 1962, the beginning of the Kennedy administration and the very height of the Cold War. Screenwriter Rod (TWILIGHT ZONE) Serling, does a terrific job of adapting the material for the screen, compressing the action into a breathless race against time to uncover and stop a planned military coup against the president.

President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March), has signed a joint nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, an agreement in which both super powers agree to mutually dispose of their arsenals of nuclear weapons. This accord draws the ire and contempt of General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), who sees it as a sign of weakness. Scott fears the Russians cannot be trusted to uphold their end of the bargain and that the United States must remain strong and eternally vigilant. That means that the military must be in charge of the government and not the weak and conciliatory President Lyman.

Scott launches a plot, code named ECOMCON, which will culminate in a military coup d'etat in seven days time. Scott's aide, Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas), is left out of the loop concerning the plot which he eventually stumbles across by accident. With little hard evidence, he presents his case to Lyman, who ultimately believes him and the race is on to find out just what exactly ECOMCON is and put a stop to it.

Lyman and Casey are aided by Senator Ray Clark (Edmond O'Brien), Presidential aide Paul Girard (Martin Balsam), and cabinet member Chris Todd (George Macready). Scott's band of plotters include Colonel Mutt Henderson (Andrew Duggan), venomous television commentator Harold McPherson (Hugh Marlowe), traitorous Senator Fred Prentice (Whit Bissell) and sinister Colonel Ben Murdock (Richard Anderson).

Caught in the middle between these two groups of men, is one woman, Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), a former girlfriend of Scott's who holds letters from him that may help Casey expose the plot. Jiggs romances and seduces Eleanor in order to acquire the letters but he doesn't have to use them in the end.

The action moves swiftly from Washington D.C., to a secret military installation outside of El Paso, to Gibraltar, before coming to a head in the Oval Office. President Kennedy, a fan of the original novel, allowed Frankenheimer and his production crew access to the White House to photograph the Oval Office and other rooms and hallways which allowed the set builders to faithfully recreate them on a sound stage. The Pentagon did not allow the filmmakers access, so all scenes set there take place on sets drawn entirely from imagination.

Frankenheimer orchestrates everything effectively and efficiently. He's got a great script, a powerhouse cast and a terrific score by Jerry Goldsmith, which uses snare drums set to a military cadence for maximum impact and tension.

It's tempting to say that given the current political situation, one that is fraught with danger given the fact that a completely unhinged man is serving as President, that maybe, just maybe, we need someone like a General Scott to step up and initiate a 21st century ECOMCON. Clearly, I do not, in any way, advocate for a removal of any president from office by force of arms, but don't think this movie didn't give me some ideas.

Regardless of who is in the White House at any given moment, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY has stood the test of time and holds up remarkably well. It's a first rate piece of filmmaking, one that earns my highest recommendation.