Seven Days in May

John Frankenheimer directed Seven Days in May, a 1964 political thriller based on a bestseller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey III.  We had the book in the house and I must have read it when I was about ten.  I recall some sex scenes in the novel but nothing else. I have a more precise memory of the big budget prestige movie based on the book -- watching the film on Turner Classic Movies last night, some sequences seemed familiar to me, although I had forgotten the picture's plot and its "big themes" -- a lovingly detailed, although narratively insignificant sequence in which an ally of the beleagered President Lyman approaches a touring air-craft carrier on a skiff and, then, comes onto the huge boat has remained with me.  (Although now seeing the sequence more than 50 years later, I observe that it is spatially incoherent.  The vast bulk of the aircraft carrier dwarfs the little boat approaching it.  The director has no idea how the small boat somehow disgorges it's passengers on the deck seventy feet overhead.  This is characteristic of the confusion that afflicts this film at every level.)  I also remembered a bleak aircraft crash location where Spanish gendarmes wearing outlandish hats stood baffled in the smoking debris while men carrying litters, presumably laden with the dead, wandered here and there in the wreckage. 

The film's premise is that a steely right-wing Air Force general, James Matoon Scott (Burt Lancaster playing Douglas McArthur) has engineered a military coup to displace a highly unpopular president, Jordan Lyman (Frederick March).  Scott's factotum, an appealing, plain-spoken Marine named Jigs Casey (Kirk Douglas) senses that something is amiss -- there are peculiar clues scattered about and, slowly, Jigs uncovers the awful truth.  Seven days from the film's beginning (May 12), an ostensible military exercise will result in the detention of the president and TV broadcasts that Scott has seized power to save the republic.  Lyman has entered into a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Russians that the Pentagon opposes.  (Even the reasonable happy warrior, Jigs, thinks the deal is a disaster.)  Scott wants to avert the treaty and is willing to seize power to take control.  The film divides into three parts:  first Jigs figures out what the bad guys are planning, second, the President and his men try to gather sufficient proof to expose the coup before it takes place, and, third, the President and General Scott debate the merits of their respective positions.  The script is by Rod Serling and it has very snappy, elegant dialogue -- Serling's modus operandi is primarily theatrical:  he sets up dramatic confrontations between his protagonists who, then, tear up the scenery haranguing one another.  Serling is middle-brow literate and clever, but the film's action comes down to a series of conversations and debates.  The picture is shot in documentary-style black and white and it has some of the high-contrast imagery, glaringly lit, that features in Kubrick's much greater Dr. Strangelove produced a year later.  But none of the images are memorable and Serling tells the story through dialogue not pictures.  A good example of a purely pictorial sequence that goes badly awry is the opening scene:  totally silent files of protesters and counter-protesters in front of the White House march back and forth, past one another.  Finally, someone clubs another protester with his sign and fracas breaks out.  The street-fighting is chaotic and the scene goes on and on -- it's much longer than necessary and makes no point at all.  Somehow, Frankenheimer manages to make a riot uninteresting pictorially.  And the prelude to the riot, the two groups of demonstrators marching past one another is grim, stark silence makes no sense at all -- the groups would either be widely separated and shouting at each other, or, if allowed to mingle, also engaging in argument.  Other sequences don't make any logical sense.  One of the Senators dispatched to investigate a secret military base near El Paso is detained by MPs and, since he is a drunk, tempted with bottles of bourbon.  The old drunk heroically pours the bourbon into a toilet.  (We see the toilet in the background in an early shot in the sequence; toilets were not ordinarily shown in movies in 1963 and, so, it's pretty clear that the commode will have some narrative function in the movie.)  But later the old drunk is lying on a bed with two fresh bottles of bourbon on his night-stand.  Why doesn't he pour those down the drain too?  And are the MPs so stupid they just keep plying this guy with bottles of booze that he doesn't drink?  The climax of the film is completely incoherent.  If General Scott is so poised to depose the President -- and thinks he has good patriotic grounds to do this, why would he call off the plot just because it is exposed an hour or two early?  A big plot point has to do with some purloined letters:  Jigs has seduced General Scott's mistress (he has broken up with her) and taken love letters between her and Scott.  Why?  Do the letters contain evidence of the coup?  (This seems unlikely -- the megalomaniacal and paranoid Scott would not expose the plan to his girlfriend; this makes no sense).  So are the letters going to be used to humiliate Scott by exposing his love affair and sexual misconduct?  That's how the film plays the issue, although it's all ambiguous and never really explained.  Ultimately, the noble president determines the ends don't justify the means and that he will not use the letters against his adversary.  But if the risk is that a military junta seizes power and that the Soviets, then,  take advantage of our disarray to nuke us ("with, at least, 100 million dead") shouldn't the president use every means at his disposal to avert the coup.  (Today when a president's sexual exploits are front-page news, the rectitude of the characters in Seven Days in May about exposing the sexual pecadillos of public figures is both touching and naive.)  The film assumes that bringing crimes and misdemeanors into the light of public scrutiny disinfects the contagion afflicting the body-politic -- like the later Watergate pictures, the film is essentially a pro-journalism tract:  brave journalists will expose the truth and save the republic.  Jigs supports the Constitution and says that although he dislikes Lyman's politics, there is a way to register that disapproval -- it's the ballet-box in November.  Some of Serling's speechifying is effective and moving, but a lot of it is just bombast.  At one point, President Lyman tells his colleagues that the enemy isn't General Scott, but the malaise of the nuclear age.  That's completely idiotic --the whole film is devised to pivot on a climactic hand-to-hand debate between Lyman and Scott.  Of course, the enemy is the pernicious, conniving, and murderous Scott.  The final confrontation between Jigs and Scott is exemplary of Serling's style.  Scott snarls:  "Have you studied your Bible?  Do you know who Judas was?"  To which Jigs replied:  "He was a man I admired.  A four-star general who betrayed his nation."  Poor Judas is spinning in his grave somewhere.  The movie is badly dated -- after President Lyman's noble defense of the constitution at a Press Conference, the gentlemen and the ladies of the Press rise and give him a standing ovation. (There is a primitive science-fiction element to the film -- the characters confer by video tele-conference, undertaken on massive tube-operated TV sets; the automobiles belong to no known era or manufacturer). 

The film is well-acted and the secondary characters are more compelling than the cartoon-like Scott, President Lyman, and Jigs.  Martin Balsam is good as the President's political advisor -- he gets killed in the plane crash.  Edmund O'Brien is effective as the "dipsomaniac" Georgia senator, Ray Clark.  Ava Gardner is used in a cruel and unflattering way -- she plays Scott's spurned mistress who succumbs all too readily to Jigs' machinations.  Clearly, she thought the role was important and was willing to be portrayed as a faded, scheming salon courtesan, but she looks a little pathetic and her part is under-written.  A supposedly happy ending suggesting that she and Jigs will get together for a romantic interlude is just grotesque. 

The film was endorsed by President Kennedy who authorized filming the botched riot scene in front of the White House.  The Pentagon opposed the film and the curious spatial incongruities in the destroyer scene are due to the fact that the sequence was made "guerilla-style" without the assistance of the navy.  The demise of General Scott was supposed to be a car crash, probably suicidal.  For some reason, the film doesn't use that ending, although it was shot -- the picture sends Scott off-screen with the simple remark to his chauffeur:  "Take me home."  There is an enigmatic reference to a General Walker -- this is refers to events current to the movie, that are now, more or less, forgotten.  A right-wing general, Edwin Walker, made political remarks hostile to the President's Administration and was forced tor esign.