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John Frankenheimer (1930-2002) was an amazing director with a very long and distinguished career. His movies, both the good and the bad, were always modern in technique and relevance, no mean feat for a director whose career spanned six decades.

And every single American citizen should watch his sixth motion picture before the November 2004 presidential election: Seven Days in May, released in 1963.

The World He Made in Seven Days

Of course, almost everyone knows of Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate not just because of its quite effective 2004 remake, but as an exquisite study in paranoia and the inter-relationship between patriotism, volition, and the treatment of US war veterans. While The Manchurian Candidate is an unnerving exercise in paranoia, Frankenheimer made another political thriller that strikes much closer to home.

Seven Days in May is one of Frankenheimer's best political thrillers, and ranks amongst the best conspiracy films of all times. Set at some point in the future (relative, of course, to its 1963 release), the American President signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Russians, causing a conspiracy of military personnel to overthrow the government out of fear of defenselessness again Communist aggression.

If one watches the 1999 DVD release with Frankenheimer's commentary, the director himself said that a film like this cannot be made today. Beyond the modern tropes of film marketing that Frankenheimer clearly despised (most notably re-editing a film based on focus group previews), he also claimed that modern audiences would not be able to relate to the stirring speeches and moral high ground of the film's President, exquisitely acted by Fredric March with dialog penned by none other than Rod Serling. He felt that the office of the President had been too "debased" to allow for modern audiences to believe that an American president could be just, descent, and of outstanding moral character.

I think for all his genius, Frankenheimer is wrong on this point: I think his movies continue to resonate precisely because the American people are yearning for a president of outstanding moral character. And after almost four decades, it's about damn time.

Seven Days Before November

Watch and listen carefully to Seven Days in May. You'll hear plenty of Rod Serling's personal voice and political platform; while the story for the film was adapted, the dialog is all Serling. It can be heavy-handed and melodramatic, but the core themes are gripping.

The President in the film gives two stirring monologues. The first, in act two, is about how Americans look to white knights to save them from chaos and indecision, electing them as their own personal god for the duration. This is a very direct sting against Senator Joseph MacCarthy during his neo-fascist anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1950's, but sets a cautionary tone that there is no such thing as a one-person solution, nor a quick fix to any problem. Like, say, a president for example.

The second monologue, the third act's conclusion, bemoans the fact that the world no longer thinks that America is strong enough to use peace rather than force. Now doesn't that sound familiar? It's a powerful thing, seeing a film made four decades ago, presaging what many consider the greatest global political crisis of this generation.

It's an important movie in many ways, not to say anything of the great Saul Bass animation sequence over the titles or Frankenheimer's own brand of wide-angle, infinite-focus shot compositions.

Give it a watch before the election...if nothing else, its message will have you asking, indeed, why we must always choose the lesser of both evils.