'Seven Days of May' in the shadow of Trump's presidency

The 1964 film Seven Days in May is an interesting curio today. For one thing, we just don't make political thrillers anymore -- George Clooney's underrated Ides of March (2011) is the last one that comes to mind -- but also it's the portrait it paints of the presidency, which is light years away from our current perspective on the office.

It's not that the American people lost all respect for the presidency overnight, but there has clearly been an erosion under Trump, whose cynical 'we're all killers' logic has undermined decades of effort in the real world and the fictional one to convey a sense that the presidency is something sacred, held by men (and sometimes women) who are basically decent and honorable.

Back in '64, the existential threat was not from within the White House but outside it -- either a foreign invading power or in the case of this film fascist elements from within the military industrial complex. In the aftermath of Generals Patton and MacArthur, the idea of a popular demagogue rising up from within the ranks of the armed forces to undermine or even depose a sitting president wasn't such a laughable idea.

Today, ironically, many members of the media and political establishment had placed an inordinate amount of faith in someone like former Defense Secretary James Mattis (one suspects that the only reason the image-focused president selected him was his alleged 'mad-dog' nickname) to "hold the line" against Trump's more outrageous foreign policy whims.

Part of this may be the result of a post 9/11 revisionism of many Americans' attitudes towards the military. Despite many blunders and travesties since that horrific terrorist attack (think Abu Gharib) there has been a stalwart sense that the military are the good guys and if and when they err it's largely due to the overreach of Machiavellian civilians back home.

What Seven Days in May posits is how scary the world might be should a military man with delusions of grandeur might be capable of, should they decide to take advantage of that good will for nefarious means. Not unlike Dr. Strangelove -- which exploits this tension for great, dark comic effect --  Seven Days of May is deadly serious about its portrayal of a would-be military coup and the president whose stature it would threaten.

In a stacked cast -- the president is played by the elegant, earnest Frederic March. His party is never explicitly name-checked but he reads like an Obama Democrat, someone who is thoughtful, resistant to using military force unless its a last resort and less concerned with polls as is with doing what's right.

At the start of the film, he's a deeply unpopular incumbent who is being publicly rebuked by his own chairman of the joints chief of staff, played with chilly precision by Burt Lancaster. Curiously, the film doesn't take a definitive side at first (it opens with protests both for and against March's peacenik policies) but as the film unfolds we come to understand that Lancaster's motivations are far more self serving than he publicly lets on.

March is made aware of Lancaster's scheme early in the film by another military underling -- Kirk Douglas, in peak movie star mode -- and much of the film is about how his allies in the West Wing guard against what they see as inevitable and unprecedented power grab.

It's by far the most talky and muted of director John Frankenheimer's run of politically charged adult thrillers of the '60s (it's neither as fast-paced as The Manchurian Candidate or as foreboding or experimental as Seconds), but it's still a sturdy and smart production that also serves as a time capsule for when we not only listened very closely to what a president had to say but we also by and large believed it.

Now, I'm not so naive as to suggest that a certain amount of detachment from the White House is a good thing. As a journalist and as a progressive, I'm glad we no longer take president's proclamations simply at face value as gospel. But while in the past there was more of an effort to massage the truth in a more flattering light -- we now are faced with people willing to create their 'own' truths that . disregards realities that we can clearly see and hear.

Take for instance the White House's insistence that Trump skipped a crucial G7 meeting on climate change because he was busy meeting privately with the prime ministers of India and Germany, only for it to quickly be revealed that both of those foreign leaders were at the climate change meeting themselves. I've yet to hear the administration's explanation for this clearly dishonest act on their part but I am certain that they'll never acknowledge that they lied -- in fact, that will likely not even concede that they made a mistake. We've come to expect a lack of morality and rectitude from the presidency now that would have been unfathomable in the year after John F. Kennedy's death.

Without spoiling it entirely, I'll simply say that Seven Days in May ends on something of a defiantly inspirational note -- with the president stepping up to protect the integrity of his office. It seems almost quaint now when it's far more likely that the current person occupying that office for real has made no qualms about disparaging the intelligence and 'loyalty' of a majority of Jewish voters or disregarding the safety and security of people he's very much responsible for governing.