![]() ![]() They plan to use the opportunity of a government-planned nuclear alert exercise to seize control of the country’s radio, television and telecommunication networks and to oust President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) and his administration. His cabal has set up a secret combat unit, based in El Paso, Texas. The group’s leader is the charismatic General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancester), head of the Air Force. ![]() The premise is an attempted military coup in the USA, by a group comprising Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior politicians dismayed that the incumbent president has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Rod Serling’s screenplay for Seven Days in May is adapted from a 1962 novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II. (Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, also released in 1964 and which I’ve not seen, may be another example.) ![]() This is fair enough – it’s much less imaginative than either – but Seven Days is still a forceful political thriller and, like the other two movies, an illustration of how American film-makers in the early 1960s were able to draw on Cold War anxieties to create intelligent and commercially successful cinema. Released in America fifteen months after The Manchurian Candidate and just two weeks after Dr Strangelove, Seven Days in May has always been overshadowed by those contemporaries. ![]()
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