John Frankenheimer’s 1964 drama Seven
Days in May is inevitably dated, and a bit too arid, but remains a stirring
reference point, not least for how its resonances shift with the times. The
film sets out how Marine Corps. Colonel Casey (Kirk Douglas) stumbles onto
evidence of a possible coup plot by his direct superior, James Scott (Burt
Lancaster), and other military brass, in response to a recently-negotiated,
highly divisive peace treaty with Russia (viewed in the age of Trump, one might
almost shake one’s head at the inefficiency of plotting to subvert the
democratic process by way of such cumbersome intervention, compared to the much
more direct method of doing it from within). The movie’s aging President Lyman,
embodied with great authoritative nuance by Fredric March, seems now like the
kind of leader that’s lost in time (notwithstanding that Joe Biden was cut from
similar cloth), even refusing out of basic decency to use some salacious
letters that it seems would have done much to sully Scott’s reputation. But his
instincts are sharp, seeing better than Scott that a United States in the hands
of a military dictatorship would far more likely provoke Russian aggression
than extinguish it, and here too, it’s impossible not to mull on how the
current administration’s coup-like disregard for conventions and norms coexists
with an inexplicable subservience to Russian self-interest and distortion of
reality. Although some of the film’s devices now seem simplistic, such as the flurry
of bland-seeming messages about a horse racing betting pool which turn out to
be incredibly consequential communications about participation in the coup, these
add to the pervasive sense of institutional vulnerability, to its excessive
reliance on a few good men (and in this film, of course, they are all indeed
men, a point underlined by the tediously shoehorned subplot involving Ava Gardner).
