Review – Seven Days in May

Turn director John Frankenheimer and screenwriter Rod Serling loose in the conspiracy-happy months following the Kennedy assassination, and this is pretty much what you’re bound to come up with. Burt Lancaster stars as the power-mad head of the Joint Chiefs, out to depose an unpopular president and place the country under martial law. Only an aide with the usual admirable sense of right and wrong (Kirk Douglas) stands between this madman and his evil victory. Despite Serling’s talents the script comes up weak in parts, especially at the beginning where our hero sniffs out the plot based on some pretty flimsy evidence and at the end where the drama devolves into pedantic speechifying about the virtues of democracy and the evils of its opposite. On Frankenheimer’s part, this comes across as an attempt to re-create his previous, considerable success with The Manchurian Candidate. Minor defects aside, however, this is a fine piece of paranoia-driven cinema. Worth seeing