Bad Futures #1: Seven Days in May

Seven Days in May

John Frankenheimer
Initial release: February 12, 1964 (USA)

When White House Chief of Staff Paul Girard's passenger jet goes down in rural Spain at the midway point of Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer's second big paranoid political thriller after The Manchurian Candidate, nobody in the film says it nor is it exactly implied, but I guarantee you someone in the audience in 1964 had to be thinking: what if that plane crash wasn't an accident? It might have seemed unlikely, even unthinkable — in 1964, it was still commonly assumed that even political opponents (usually) played by the rules, and plane accidents happened all the time. But in 2026, it's hard not to wonder: was the plane deliberately brought down to stop Girard from exposing a coup plot?

It's that coup that sits at the core of Seven Days in May. In what at the time was the near-future of 1970 (incidentally, it looked a lot like 1963, just with videophones) the United States President, Jordan Lyman, has initiated a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union (predicating a very real treaty enacted in 1972.) Aside from making him fairly unpopular, it's also incurred the wrath of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Air Force general James Scott, who believe Lyman has not only been bamboozled by the Soviets, but sold out America and its safety in the name of soft-hearted liberalism. The coup is organized clandestinely, with the Joint Chiefs and their fellow travelers communicating in code via a horse race betting pool. It's only the sharp eye of Colonel Casey, Director of the Joint Chiefs, that leads to the plot being exposed when he realizes what his bosses are up to. The Joint Chiefs are forced out, the scandalous evidence the President and his faction intended to use as a plan B is returned to Scott's former lover unused, and everything is wrapped up tidy; if only Scott were to die in a bus crash or something, it would be tidier still.

Of course, real life is never that tidy, but Seven Days in May, though very realistic, is not real life. With the clandestine support of President John F. Kennedy (and in fact delayed in releasing by his assassination,) Frankenheimer's film is ultimately a rebuke of McCarthyism and the creatures it spawned: Edwin Walker, a disgraced general forced into early retirement for treating his troops like his personal fascist army; and Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, who clashed with Kennedy on multiple occasions over Cuba. Scott as a character isn't as sinister as either of these, at least on paper: Burt Lancaster, a liberal-minded Democrat, thought the character was unduly unfair to Republicans, and had to be talked into the role on the basis of Scott being merely misguided, not a sinister mastermind bent on seizing power for himself.

But it's a fantasy the way the rest of the film is a fantasy; by any reasonable metric, Scott is a fascist, and an egotistical one at that. Kirk Douglas as Colonel Casey stands as the reasonable figure between Scott and Lyman; Lyman, despite his age, is an idealist, the kind of New Deal Democrat that led America through World War II and the tumultuous 1960s. Such an idealist is he that he ultimately decides not to use the damning scandalous evidence that Casey managed to wrangle out of an old girlfriend who Scott had a thing for once, even though that was thought to be the last remaining option. (All the more evidence that the film is a fantasy, a kind of morality play in which the "good guys" don't stoop to such lowly measures, even though they might consider it — nevermind that the fate of the free world is at stake.) Casey, standing in the middle, outright states that he agrees more with Scott than he does with Lyman — and yet his principles as a patriot necessitate that he must do everything in his power to stop Scott. And why not? After all, Lyman says, you don't enact change through coups and takeovers and secret plots, you get involved in politics (says the politician.) Though he doesn't outright say it in so many words in his confrontation with Scott in the Oval Office in the film's final act, Lyman's message is clear: "trust the system," the motto of every wide-eyed idealistic Democrat of the last sixty years, uttered in the same intonations as the last remaining QAnon faithful would say "trust the plan."

All this probably sounds meaner to the film than I really intended. I actually like the movie; as political thrillers go, I actually prefer it over The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer was a genius filmmaker who used the lessons he learned shooting TV shows in the 1950s to make taut thrillers and social dramas. While The Manchurian Candidate kind of lands on a mixed message politically speaking, Seven Days in May is unquestionably anti-fascist, a Democrat revenge fantasy that places a variety of colorful characters on the side of the angels against a gang of humorless traitors. Filmed during the last year of Kennedy's life, it's an artifact of an America that had not yet begun to feel the effects of its involvement in Vietnam. Its near-future setting imagines a world not too different from the year it was filmed: some advances in technology, sure, but things like Vietnam or the Space Race go unmentioned. The Vietnam War may as well never even have happened in Frankenheimer's 1970; no, the world he envisages is somehow worse, a world where the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis go unlearned and a military with nothing better to do decides they should be in charge. Seven Days in May is a product of the most dangerous period of the Cold War, low-key and paranoid, fixated on the enemy within because the enemy without is far too abstract. It's the kind of film that could only have been made in that uneasy moment between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the death of Kennedy. Under Frankenheimer's direction, Seven Days in May is that rare creature: a film noir in the guise of a political thriller, a murder mystery where the victim is the Constitution.

Frankenheimer made good movies and he made good television. His camera was an eye that witnessed the mood of a nation under the gun: exhausted, paranoid, and in need of a reason to keep fighting. The Train was about the preservation of beauty in an ugly world; Seven Days in May is about preserving America from those who believe in American ideals the least.

-june❤