Saturday Night At The Movies

24/7: Bride of Frankenheimer?

By Dennis Hartley

I have a confession to make: I started watching “24” this season (after ignoring the first five years, I caved in to the hype)-and I’m hooked (against my better instincts). Let me qualify that. I’m “hooked” on a purely visceral level (There’s always a car chase and stuff usually blows up real good-it’s a Guy Thing, I have no defense). In spite of the cartoonish right-wing histrionics exploiting the public’s fears about domestic terrorism, and the silly Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker dynamic with Jack Bauer and his father, I’m finding the show quite diverting (Just don’t ask me any questions about it five minutes later-all I can usually recall is Kiefer Sutherland barking urgently into his cell phone while everybody back at HQ stares purposefully into their PC monitors. Oh yeah, and then someone usually gets tortured and the odd L.A. suburb disappears in a mushroom cloud.)

When it comes to “ticking timebomb” wingnut nightmare scenarios, however, “24” cannot hold a candle to John Frankenheimer’s 1963 political potboiler, Seven Days in May The director was on a roll at the time; he had delivered The Manchurian Candidatejust one year prior. “Seven Days in May” eschewed the far-fetched plot of the former film for a more frighteningly believable speculation on how an American coup d’etat might occur.

Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Scott (Burt Lancaster). The hawkish, right wing Scott is an outspoken critic of the President (Fredric March), who has created a polarized national climate after facilitating a nuclear treaty with the Russians. General Scott has become a bit of a rock star on the Right. He delivers politicized speeches at public rallies while methodically building the support of fellow joint chiefs and conservative congressmen.

Colonel Casey admires the General, but believes a dedicated military man should remain politically neutral; he is intuitively unsettled by Scott’s increasingly brazen public stance. When the stalwart Casey begins to suspect that an upcoming military “exercise” could be something more much more sinister, he feels duty-bound to inform the President. What follows makes for a nail-biting political thriller of the highest order.

Frankenheimer infuses his film with a sense of dread and suspense without firing one shot in anger (the creators of “24” should be so lucky). The cast includes Martin Balsam, Ava Gardner and Edmond O’Brien. Rod Serling’s taut, intelligent screenplay (remember those?) is adapted from the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.

When I re-screened for this review, I was floored by the prescience of one particular piece of dialogue. In a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, the President confronts General Scott with the evidence of his sedition. After the general tells the President he deserves to be removed from office without due process, the President responds: “You want to defend the United States of America-then defend it with the tools it supplies you with…its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General-from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.” Remind you of anyone?

.