With everything going on down south in the good old United States of America I figured it would be fitting to escape current events with a lighthearted romp of a movie about an attempted military coup to overthrow the president. John Frankenheimer's 1964 classic political thriller is written by Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and stars Fredrich March as President Lyman, signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Burt Lancaster is General Scott, a military man who doesn't see this as a diplomatic solution to the Cold War but a ploy by the Russians to gain an unbeatable advantage. Kirk Douglas is Colonel Casey, the man caught between the two and Ava Gardner is Scott's former mistress who provides vital evidence of the coup to the President and his loyalists. See how much nicer this fictional White House is than Trump's.
Seven Days in May immediately lets us know what is at stake with the very first image we see on screen. The Constitution of the United States is being ripped in half. This rip is quickly revealed to be the first number in a count towards seven. These cascading numbers follow a tense drumbeat which crescendos upon the legibility of each number until the count reaches seven. There is a violent clang as the full title is revealed giving us a very brief respite from the rising tensions of these credits. The number seven falls away only to be replaced with arrowheads, a sign of war, and a marching drum beat indicating that tensions have boiled over between the involved parties. A pullback reveals the arrows to be in the eagle's claw on the presidential seal, directly implicating the president in this conflict. A cut to the White House further solidifies the setting as bars raise to lock in the house. This is no world war, this is a matter directly between the president and his top general inside the White House. That the bars are stylized to appear as rockets merely let's us know what this battle is about.
The opening credits of Seven Days in May perfectly set the tone and tell us the vague details of the story. A conflict equivalent to a war occurring between the president and another party in the white house involving nuclear weapons. This combination of imagery and music makes us incredibly nervous as an audience for what this film is promising to do.
The image of the White House behind the rocket bars dissolves into the real white house and fence as we are thrown into a protest. First we see the anti-president side. The calm, orderly demeanor of the protest is directly at odds with the extreme rhetoric written on the placards and signs being carried by the marchers. A cut flips the perspective 180 degrees to the counter protesters. This group or equally, calm and orderly protesters believe in the president and his treaty. The film doesn't identify political party affiliations during this conflict but if you don't mind I'll put the pro-military side on the right and the pro-treaty side on the left. Frankenheimer shows this with the direction the protesters are marching. The anti-treaty, anti-president side march towards the right of the screen while the pro-treaty, pro-president side marches towards the left.
These protesters are brought together by several nervous and anxious cuts and a wide shot of the two lines passing each other in the middle of the screen. Some words are exchanged, a banner is attacked and the dueling protests descend into the chaos of a wild brawl. Tensions in this fictional version of America are incredibly high the arriving policemen can barely hold everything together before a cut into a newspaper in the Oval Office. From the wild outside we are instantly thrown into the seemingly calm interior where we already know tensions are about to start ramping up by orders of magnitudes.
With the opening four and a half minutes of Seven Days in May, Frankenheimer provides the broad strokes of the conflict set to envelope the film as well as setting the tension both in the story and the audience. From the outset we turn to nervousness following the credits and are thrust into wild chaos. The rest of the film is an appropriately tense thrill ride of political turmoil.
No comments:
Post a Comment