Warner Archive Collection

Seven Days in May Blu-ray Review

Patriots

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, May 7, 2017

The paranoid political thriller thrived in Seventies cinema, but two classics of the genre appeared during the Kennedy administration a decade earlier, and both were made by the same director. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, and its durability has made the title a pop culture and political catchphrase. But Frankenheimer wasn't done. The following year, he directed Seven Days in May, which was released in February 1964. Though the two films have much in common, including the editing genius of Ferris Webster, Seven Days differs from Frankenheimer's earlier film in critical respects. It lacks a high-concept device comparable to the post-hypnotic brainwashing of The Manchurian Candidate, and it doesn't have a foreign enemy pulling strings from afar as a readily identifiable villain. In Seven Days, the attack on America comes from within, and Frankenheimer's challenge was to build an onscreen world in which that threat would seem credible. He succeeded so effectively that Seven Days has been chilling audiences ever since, even as numerous elements of the film have dated, from its technology to the pervasive cigarette smoking. Scripted by Rod Serling from a novel that Frankenheimer didn't know would become a bestseller when he and star Kirk Douglas acquired the rights, Seven Days stands as a nagging reminder that democracy is a fragile thing.Seven Days is set at an indefinite date after 1964, when U.S. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) is on the verge of signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The country is bitterly divided over the wisdom of the treaty. In the film's opening sequence, demonstrators clash in front of the White House, in a documentary-style sequence that would become all too familiar on the evening news in the years to come. (It was President Kennedy, an admirer of The Manchurian Candidate, who facilitated the necessary permissions for Frankenheimer and his crew to shoot crowd scenes in the real location; the President even vacated the White House during filming to ease security concerns.) Chief among the treaty's opponents is Gen. James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whose popularity already has him positioned for a presidential run in the next election.But Gen. Scott doesn't intend to wait that long. He believes that the U.S. cannot survive without its nuclear capability, and he has engineered a bold plan to prevent the disarmament treaty from ever being signed. Scott's scheme involves a secret base of specially trained troops, seizure of the nation's communications centers, and a declaration of martial law. Key members of Congress and the press have been enlisted in the general's cause, and an "alert" exercise scheduled for May 18 has been designed as a cover for a swift and bloodless coup that will remove President Lyman and the rest of the civilian authority.Seven days before Scott's operation, however, his chief assistant, Col. Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Douglas), becomes suspicious. He spots anomalies in the preparations for the upcoming exercise. A betting pool sent through coded channels to a specific set of individuals seems to be about more than just a horse race. A chance encounter with an old Army friend alerts Jiggs to a military division designated as "EComCon" that has been erased from all official records but is currently preparing for deployment. Faced with the prospect that his commanding officer may be about to subvert the very Constitution he swore to defend, Jiggs is torn by competing loyalties between the commander he admires and the country he serves. Eventually, he finds himself in the White House, reluctantly detailing his concerns to a skeptical President Lyman and his closest advisors.Kirk Douglas famously regretted taking the role of Jiggs, while allowing his friend, Burt Lancaster, whom Douglas insisted that Frankenheimer cast, to play the villain of Seven Days. Certainly Gen. Scott is the flashier role, and Lancaster brings conviction and star power to the general's sense of his own destiny, especially in the climactic confrontation with President Lyman, which Frankenheimer would later say was the best scene he ever directed. But Douglas' understated performance is equally impressive. His face reveals Jiggs's growing anguish as he realizes what his superior officer is planning, and his halting delivery when Jiggs relates his concerns to the President eloquently bespeaks his inner doubts. Later, when Jiggs is tasked with extracting potential blackmail material from the general's former girlfriend, Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), who has opened her heart to him in the hope that he'll respond, Douglas' face is a study in conflicted emotion. Douglas may not have the grand speeches reserved for Lancaster's general or March's President, but he does get to deliver the film's ultimate indictment of Gen. Scott in a final, damning line, and he makes the most of it.The supporting players are just as good as the leads. As Frankenheimer repeatedly notes in his commentary, he had worked with many of them before and knew their capabilities. The reliable Martin Balsam plays Paul Girard, the President's top advisor, and Edmund O'Brien, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work, portrays the hard-drinking Senator Raymond Clark of South Carolina, who is the President's chief legislative ally. Both are deployed on important missions for the President after he learns of Gen. Scott's plan, and both meet with resistance and opposition (with radically varying results). The imposing John Houseman appears (uncredited) as Vice-Adm. Barnswell, a key military player whose loyalties appear to be determined by a canny survivor's instinct. A bevy of familiar faces from Frankenheimer's days of directing TV fills out the cast.Frankenheimer's direction of Seven Days is a master class in the use of framing and focal lengths to create tension and suspense while juggling a large cast effectively. He frames faces at varying distances and often shoots from below to create a subtly distorted perspective, and he uses deep focus to include background actors in the scene, even while an intense conversation occupies the foreground. Most directors would cut back and forth, but Frankenheimer's approach is more quietly revealing, especially on multiple viewings. Editor Ferris Webster reuses and refines some of the unsettling rhythms he created for The Manchurian Candidate. Look, for example, at the sequence where Jiggs watches Gen. Scott deliver a televised address, with a growing sense of unease as the general's fiery rhetoric seems to confirm all the clues pointing to his covert actions. The edits display the same abrupt timing and unsettling closeups used in The Manchurian Candidate when Dr. Yen Lo demonstrates his control the over the brainwashed American G.I.s.