Inherit the Wind - 1960

Inherit the Wind (1960) pits Fredric March versus Spencer Tracy, and fundamentalist religion versus science, but at its core is the premise that knowledge should not be repressed because the religious right is uncomfortable with it.

This is obviously a timely message for our present era, but the script was based on the 1955 play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, whose message was more about the repression of McCarthyism than creationism, who used the famous standoff of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to reflect on not only the right of free speech, but of the very right to think for oneself.

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral,” goes one line in this strong, literate script.

As regards the battle between Mr. March and Mr. Tracy as actors, it is a pleasure to see two old lions with juicy character parts to play.  Since much of the story takes place in a courtroom, which is inherently dramatic, this gives them a notable setting to joust. 

Spencer Tracy, of course, was famous for stealing a scene just by standing still, but Fredric March stretches even his usual strong screen presence by unrepentant scenery chewing in this movie.  At times, it appears to render his character somewhat cartoonish, but then, we know that bombastic men who enjoy public notoriety can sometimes appear cartoonish.

Directed by Stanley Kramer, the film is rich in atmosphere with the setting of a small Southern town almost lyric in its storytelling.  I love the slow-moving camera that glides around characters in a scene without sharp, abrupt cuts. 

We begin with the tick-tock of the clock on the courthouse, and the march of a sheriff, joined by others including a minister, to the jailhouse to retrieve the prisoner for his trial.  There is no one else on the streets, and its almost like a “high noon” showdown in a western.

There is no desperado in the jail, however, just young Dick York, a high school science teacher who has taught his class about evolution from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man. We will soon see that it is something of a show trial rather than a criminal indictment; the creationists have enticed a nationally known public speaker to prosecute the case, and an equally nationally known lawyer arrives to defend Dick York. 

York plays his role with sensitivity and nuance, he was really a fine actor before his more well-known gig as Darrin Stevens in the TV show, Bewitched. His character is overwhelmed by the attention, pained over the separation from his fiancée, who is not sure his crusade is either wise or necessary, and ultimately he takes a principled stand because of the trauma inflicted on the parents of a student by fundamentalist insensitivity over their son’s tragic death.

Gene Kelly plays a smart-aleck reporter, whose newspaper has provided the services of Spencer Tracy as a means to showcase the event and sell papers. 

Florence Eldridge, the real-life wife of Fredric March, plays his wife here.  This was the final of several films she made with her husband. We last saw her play his longsuffering wife here in Another Part of the Forest (1948).  She is not so longsuffering in Inherit the Wind, but she does have a lot to contend with keeping her larger-than-life husband supported with her understanding, fried chicken, and occasional admonishments to keep him in line.

The characters played by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Gene Kelly, and Dick York are, of course, all based on real-life people.  They are given fictional names here, perhaps to keep the story more of a parable than a documentary.  The real figures are William Jennings Bryan, who like his fictional counterpart played by March is a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president, was a Secretary of State under President Wilson, and a noted orator whose “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 pushing for keeping the U.S. off the gold standard monetary system made him a giant of nineteenth-century American politics. He, like his fictional counterpart, also supported women’s right to vote, which makes him a fascinating contradiction.

Spencer Tracy’s character is based on Clarence Darrow, eminent attorney and one-time supporter of William Jennings Bryan in his presidential campaigns.  It also seems like an abrupt contradiction when Tracy and March meet at the local hotel and we think the fireworks will start, but they greet each other as old friends. 

First, Tracy greets Florence Eldridge warmly; they are old friends, too.  We are set up to understand that though the citizens of this small town who clamor at the courthouse and burn Dick York in effigy are hot under the collar at feeling their religious beliefs are threatened, the fight between the two old gladiators is an intellectual sparring of mutual respect. 

Gene Kelly’s character is based on the acerbic journalist H.L. Menken, himself a bundle of contradictions who enjoyed tearing down pomposity, but was himself an elitist, who was not a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The so-called Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a blistering hot week of July 1925.  Here in the movie, a local funeral parlor passes out fans with their advertising to the people in the courtroom.  Later in the film, the two combatant counsels get permission to peel off their suit coats. (In the real trial, the proceedings were finally allowed to take place outdoors due to the awful heat in the courtroom.)

Because the teaching of evolution is taken as a blasphemy by creationists who take the Bible as literal, and is illegal in Tennessee, the story quickly becomes, as it did in 1925, a fight to preserve religious teaching from being pushed aside in relevance by scientific thought.  We begin the story, as the men march to from the courthouse, one of them wearing a clerical collar, we hear an acapella rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.”  It sung as a slow, stately dirge by Leslie Uggams.  This is just a voiceover, however.  We do not see her, nor do we see any people of color in this movie.  Another interesting contradiction.

This is a somber moment, and though the quiet streets of this small town will soon be filled with street vendors selling souvenirs and hot dogs, and an actual carnival with a Ferris Wheel, the intent at the outset in this community is to keep their dignity and pride.

In the courtroom, Mr. Tracy and Mr. March, both of nimble minds despite their tired bodies, hash out not so much the Constitutional ideas of separation of church and state, or the First Amendment, but rather confine themselves almost entirely to biblical logic and illogic. 

Mr. March states with authority that the world began in 4,004 B.C. on October 4^th at 9:00 a.m., and Mr. Tracy after some thrust and parry, gets Mr. March to admit that the day at the time of creation might not have been a precise 24 hours.  One day might have lasted years, or eons.

This is the crux of the courtroom battle, for Tracy’s expert witnesses, all representing scientific disciplines, are disallowed by the judge, played by Harry Morgan.  To build his case, Tracy must rely on putting Mr. March on the stand instead and using Mr. March’s formidable knowledge of the Bible to turn the tables on him. 

Because they are old colleagues and know each other well, the twists and turns of their minds is like playing chess with a familiar opponent.

Fredric March, rather than protest, actually enjoys being put on the stand because he is something of a grandstander, who clearly directs his remarks not to the jury, and not to Mr. Tracy, but rather to the crowd in packed seats in the courthouse, and the new-fangled radio microphone in court.  He loves an audience.

This is where March does most of his mugging and scenery chewing, but how close this came to the real William Jennings Bryan, I really don’t know.  He is, at least in the film, an example of a highly intelligent man who enjoys an argument, but with God on his side, anyone who opposes him must be morally deficient.  The townspeople, already disposed to find fault with Dick York’s teaching evolution in his science class to their teenagers, is gleeful to see his lawyer marked as a heretic. 

At one point, we see Fredric March, along with his wife, show great compassion and concern for Dick York’s fiancée, played by Donna Anderson.  She is troubled by the trial, especially since her father is actually the minister, played by Claude Akins.  He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and in one scene, when he prays to a photo of his deceased wife in his daughter’s presence, begging his wife not to condemn their daughter for loving and defending a heretic schoolteacher, from falling from the way of grace, and we see he is unfeeling, cold, manipulative, and arrogant.  When she seeks guidance in the matter from March, he is kind and we see another side of the famous grandstander.

However, in confidence, she has told him that Dick York left the church.  A student of his drowned two years previously, a 13-year-old boy, and Preacher Claude Akins said the boy was damned because he had not been baptized.  This infuriates Dick York, and pains the boy's parents, who are in the courtroom.  His father is played by Noah Beery.

March gets her on the stand and twists her words to break her, until his wife, Florence Eldridge, from the gallery, shouts his name to stop.  Is he trying to get the fiancée to repent of loving Dick York and shame her as her father tried to earlier, or does he just really want to win this case?  Is it his religious zeal or his competitiveness that turns him to cruelty?

Beyond the scenery chewing, the other aspects of March’s portrayal I find distracting is his heavy makeup and obvious skull cap to replicate William Jennings Bryan’s baldness.

Spencer Tracy manages to mock Fredric March enough to the point where even the devout gallery snickers at March and applauds Tracy, and that evening when March and Florence Eldridge retire to their hotel room, he is an exhausted and frustrated man, hurt at being laughed at in court.  We wonder if he is emotionally stable.

At the end of the trial, his character collapses in court from the heat and dies, as did the real William Jennings Bryan (though some weeks after the trial was over).  In the next scene, when Tracy is quietly packing his briefcase in court, and Gene Kelly snidely congratulates him and triumphs over the theatrical ending of Fredric March, Tracy pays tribute to March.  He calls him a great man. 

Mr. Kelly teases Tracy, and they have a brief war of words, and Kelly learns and delights in the contradictions he has discovered in Tracy.

All the three principal men in this story have their contradictions, and we leave it to Florence Eldridge’s summation when Donna Anderson confronts her about her husband’s cruel fanaticism:  “My husband is neither a saint nor a devil, and he makes mistakes…if he’s been wrong, at least he stands for something.”

Gene Kelly stands for nothing, he’s only here for the deliciously cynical mocking.  As Tracy says to him, “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”

One of Kelly’s lines I love: “It’s a newspaperman’s duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

As Tracy leaves the courtroom, we hear Leslie Uggams’ lovely voice again, acapella, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  It is slightly more triumphant-sounding, but still a sober reflection as a national song against the Civil War rebellion and the lauding of the Republic, but a republic that rejoices in victory as “the coming of the Lord.”  Again, another thought-provoking contradiction.  We are a nation full of them.

Inherit the Wind, (which Tracy quotes from the Bible, “he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” Proverbs 11:29) is one of the films from that pivotal era I mentioned in this post on A Face in the Crowd (1957):  There was…

“…something noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly liberal in their message.  Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, 'Enough.  Our turn in the sun now.'”  

Inherit the Wind, which comes out of the McCarthy era, is really about free speech, including, but not only, the right to quote from other than the Bible.  As Tracy says, “It is a good book, but it is not the only book.”

I recall an incident from when I was in college, I think it was in 1980.   I had a geology class, and the professor cheerfully announced that anyone in class who may have had deep religious beliefs need not be unsettled by the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, because it could have been God who created the Big Bang.

I was shocked by his announcement.  I had been raised to go to church and considered myself religious, yet I found nothing upsetting by learning about science.  It never occurred to me that a college professor in a very progressive state (Massachusetts) would feel the need to placate anyone about science possibly refuting their literal interpretation of the Bible.  

No one in class, as I remember, made any comment or reacted, so perhaps I was the only one surprised.  Along with church, I was also raised on the notion of separation of church and state.  

I thought he was a good teacher, and I enjoyed the class, and soon we were engrossed in talking about another Big Bang, as that was the year Mount Saint Helens erupted.  He never mentioned anything about that being in the Bible.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

 

 

Rochelle Hudson - new biography by David C. Tucker

Rochelle Hudson is the subject of David C. Tucker’s latest book, “largely because she deserved one.”

Miss Hudson’s career began in 1930 when she was still in her teens.  A 1931 WAMPAS Baby Star, the bulk of her film work occurred in the 1930s, when her roles ranged from sadder-but-wiser gun molls, nice girls, young brides, young mothers, tricksters and vamps, in an array of gangster films, action films set from the big city to the jungle, comedies, convict stories, and melodramas.   A beautiful actress, who could also sing and dance, nevertheless her career dwindled in the 1940s and her starring roles were usually in B-pictures; her finer films usually saw her in supporting parts. 

The author notes, “Even during her lifetime, however, there was a sense that she had been underappreciated.  By the mid-1940s, when her career was past its peak, columnist Ed Sullivan lamented (in 1944) -- “Rochelle Hudson should have been a much huger success.  She had everything.”

It’s a forlorn thought, but when picking through her films, as Mr. Tucker does so well, we see there are gems to remember her by most fondly:  As Shirley Temple’s big sister in Curly Top (1935), paired romantically with John Boles, she sings “The Simple Things in Life.”

Other important roles occurred in Imitation of Life (1934) as Claudette Colbert’s daughter, Les Misérables (1935) as Cozette with Fredric March, and four films with Will Rogers, the last released just after his tragic death.  She has a minor role in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

I found it delightful to discover that she also, at least on some occasions, supplied the cartoon voice of Honey in the series of Bosko cartoons in the early Looney Toons from Warner Bros.  I excitedly mentioned this to my cartoonist twin brother, but he already knew.  He always already knows anything about cartoons.  (We have a set of cute ceramic Pilgrim figures, a boy and a girl, purchased decades ago in Plymouth, Mass., and though they look nothing like the cartoon characters, John immediately dubbed them Bosko and Honey.  It never fails that, taking them out of the box every November, one or the other of us will shout, “Hel-l-o-o, Bosko!”)

Okay.  Back to Rochelle.

Mr. Tucker has written several Hollywood biographies (listed below), and the reader will always learn something new.  What I especially enjoy is examining the twists and turns of a Hollywood career through the nuts-and-bolts information on life in the film industry, including contemporaneous critical reviews of movies and a look at what was happening at the same time in Hudson’s life. Mr. Tucker is meticulous and thorough.

Miss Hudson also starred in a short-lived TV sitcom, That’s My Boy (1954-1955) and she noted in an interview on the sometimes difficult irony of pursuing a television career when at the same time her much younger self was being shown in old movies on TV.  It’s an issue I’ve often wondered about, how film stars of the Golden Age, still working, were almost in competition with their younger selves and always needing to measure up to that more glamorous image.

The book contains a complete and detailed filmography, preceded by a biography that includes information on her personal life, with many great photos.  It can be purchased here at the McFarland website.

Have a look below for my posts on David C. Tucker’s previous books on Gale Storm and S. Sylvan Simon.  Also below is a list of links where you can purchase Mr. Tucker’s other books.

 

Another Old Movie Blog: Review of Gale Storm: A Biography and Career Record by David C. Tucker

Another Old Movie Blog: An interview with author David C. Tucker - Gale Storm: A Biography and Career Record

Another Old Movie Blog: Review: S. Sylvan Simon, Moviemaker - David C. Tucker's new book

 

Other books by David C. Tucker: 

Gale Storm: A Biography and Career Record

Martha Raye: Film and Television Clown

Eve Arden: A Chronicle of All Film, Television, Radio and Stage, Performances

Shirley Booth: A Biography and Career Record

Joan Davis: America’s Queen of Film, Radio and Television Comedy

Lost Laughs of ‘50s and ‘60s Television

Pine-Thomas Productions: A History and Filmography

 

Have a look here at David C. Tucker’s blog

The Best Years of Our Lives - 1946

The Best Years of Our Lives, released in 1946 was, essentially, about 1946, illustrating a year ironically more tenuous than celebratory, in a victorious nation etched with anxiety about its future. The year 1946 means a little less to us today, except as the start of the Baby Boom. We are fairly egocentric about things like that.

Director William Wyler shows the problems of three veterans: of Homer’s prosthetic hooks; of Al’s restless dissatisfaction with his bank job and his ready relief in drink; and of Fred’s disillusionment that the wife, home in the suburbs, and good job he thought would be waiting for him after the war have fizzled out, one by one. Dana Andrews plays Fred, spending much of the movie lugging around an overstuffed army suitcase, trying to find “home.”

Wyler’s treatment of Homer, played by amputee Harold Russell, was sensitive and straightforward. Homer pulls his hooks out into view early in the film when he signs his name on a paper. We see Homer shaking “hands” repeatedly through the film, knocking on doors, drinking, eating, handling money in a billfold, never hiding his hooks but using them as naturally and as often as he would his hands, even playfully banging out “Chopsticks” in a piano duet. Wyler forces us to look at the hooks. In one splendid scene, Homer visits his uncle’s bar, and feeling at home with his pals and away from the nervousness of his family, proceeds to hold a conversation while pushing his sailor hat back farther on his head, handling a beer in a pilsner glass, shaking “hands,” and slamming his hook down on the bar as a man might slam his fist to make a point. It is stupendous for its very naturalness and simplicity.

The minor actors in The Best Years of Our Lives tell us even more about the three veterans. Fred’s father, played by Roman Bohnen, has a very brief but exceptionally moving scene as he reads aloud his son’s war citations. Homer’s younger sister, not uncomfortable with his hooks like the grownups, stares openly fascinated at them as children will. Ray Collins is both pompous and subtly sinister as Al’s hypocritical boss. Hoagy Carmichael plays the easygoing Uncle Butch, who gives Homer a sense of perspective.

It is left to the minor characters of Butch and Al’s son, Rob, to introduce the post-war world for us by discussing the atom bomb. The central characters are too preoccupied with jobs, and fitting into their families, and fitting into their civilian clothes to care about the new geopolitical realities. Rob refers to the recent enemy as “Japanese” with a delicacy that eludes his veteran father, who persists in referring to them as “Japs.”

Wyler, with subtle observation even manages to put a toe across Hollywood’s color bar by training the camera’s eye on the African-American ex-GI who waits to go home just as Al, Homer, and Fred must wait at the ATC depot. A black soldier brings his family into Fred’s drug store and is seen buying candy for his two children. The man standing in line next to Fred at the unemployment office is an African American. It is as if Wyler hints there is a parallel story here to the one of Al, Homer, and Fred, but we only get a peek.

Another legacy to us comes from the man with the flag pin on his lapel who challenges Homer to consider that a left-wing conspiracy brought the nation to war. Al, played by Oscar winner Fredric March, chides the stuffy bankers at his welcome home banquet of their suspicion of “do-gooders” and “radicals.” Today, these salvos between right and left have been diminished to a toxic cliché about blue states and red states. We are a nation fighting a nearly 20-year-old war today, and many of us wear flag pins on our lapels, but the civilian population has not been called upon to make sacrifices. Only civilians who have loved ones in the military have made sacrifices. The rest are untouched and uninvolved. It was not so in World War II.

In this film, the women the three men have come home to are not diminished; is it their story, too. Al’s wife Milly, played by Myrna Loy, and his daughter Peggy, played by Teresa Wright, display heartsick fears and frank desires. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is Fred’s nightmare, when a drunken Fred is put to bed by Peggy, a young woman he met only hours before, suffers a nightmare from what today would be called post-traumatic stress, and is comforted by Peggy, in her bed, yet there is nothing sensationalized or exploitive about it.

It is a movie whose musical score, composed by Hugo Friedhofer did not produce any catchy pop tunes, but captured each moment of conscience the way a shadow follows a body. The otherworldly sensation of Al’s first waking in his own bed after years of jungle is punctuated by the musical score; the delicate strains of the refrain that opens the film and reprises through every moment of tenderness or tension, a piece of music unnamed but unmistakable, captures the moments and meanings that makes mere lyrics inarticulate. The astonishing burst of brass ripple that begins the airplane engine noise as Fred sits in the nose of a trashed plane, experiencing a wartime flashback, all these musical incidents are by turns touching and devastating.

The Best Years of Our Lives was made in the first year of the Baby Boom, and now the Boomers are retiring, those that can. Their parents’ generation could be no better represented than by Harold Russell, who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, and later lost his hands. Two of the many Academy Awards won by that film were won by him. As a senior citizen, he sold them both in 1992, to pay for his wife’s medical bills. Retirement, as the Boomers are learning, also has its horrors.

We can only imagine what lay in store for the characters. There is no hint of the space race, the Civil Rights movement, or Vietnam, and perhaps it is just that very perspective knowing what we know now about the peace after the war, where we have succeeded as a nation and where we have failed, that adds a certain eeriness of hindsight that matches Hugo Friedhofer’s music.

There are no sure happy endings in this film. We are never told if Al is going to get a grip on his reaching for a drink in an awkward situation, but we know Milly will be there to support him. We see Homer marry his sweetheart, but his triumph in adjusting to civilian life is tempered by the real knowledge that he will never be able to turn a doorknob or button his own shirt. He will always need a little help with some things.

We are never clearly told when the “best years” were, if it was before the war, during the war, or the years yet to come. The title is ambiguous. There is no fairy tale ending for Fred and Peggy, either. Fred is the last one of the three to take off his uniform, when a job offer in construction is finally made to him, and he symbolically puts the war behind him by stripping off his bomber jacket to go to work.

When Fred and Peggy finally embrace at the end of the film he tells her that it won’t be easy, that they will have to work, “get kicked around.” It is the last line of the film, and not very romantic. She beams a radiant smile, wondrous at only the positive side of his double-edged declaration, completely ignoring the warning. We see the warning. We are still imagining their uncertain future more than seventy years after the first year of the big peace.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Old Uniforms Never Die

The uniforms are one of the most iconic images we remember from classic films.  They are the identification of The Greatest Generation.  For many of us, the uniforms are entwined with personal family memory; my father, for instance, wore the Army uniform in his formal portrait that my mother kept on the table all the years he was gone in the jungles of the South Pacific.  He wears it in snapsots  taken the first exhilarating days he finally returned home, hugging his wife and daughter while friends and relatives took turns holding the Brownie box camera (the men were allowed one month before they legally had to return to civilian clothes.)  Relatives asked him to wear it on his first rounds of visits to them, including the little nephew who wanted to see his uncle soldier. He wore out his uniform pants and shirts while gardening in the months and years ahead. 

All that's left are the medals over the breast pocket, which I still have, and the portrait photo, which sits behind me on my filing cabinet.

They are no more, except in photos.

Until now, apparently.  The Army is in the final stages of deciding upon a new uniform, and will move towards a new service dress uniform based upon the old World War II model. According to Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel Dailey, published on the site Military.com, "We wanted a uniform that we could re-identify with the American public that was significant in the American public's eye of the sense of pride in their Army," Dailey said.

"That's why we went back in history and said, 'What was the last time when there was this sense of pride and true identification … based upon their uniform?' And that's when automatically we both agreed it was Pinks and Greens during World War II.

"It was a very symbolic statement in America when you saw these young men and women coming back to and from war ... wearing that very distinctive olive drab jacket with pinkish hue pants uniform."

For more on the interview and information about this pending change in Army dress, please see this article on Military.com.

Seven Days in May - 1964

SevenDays in May (1964) uses a most meaningful and chilling biblical term in the crackling dialogue: “false prophets”. It is this phrase, so well known, and occasionally exploited by religious fundamentalists, that we hinge this post on, and not so coincidentally, this election year.

This is the fifth and last movie we will discuss in our series on the treatment of fascism in classic films. The previous four films were The Mortal Storm (1940), Address Unknown (1944), Storm Warning (1951), and Keeper of the Flame (1942).

“False prophets” is the term used by star Fredric March to describe General Edwin Walker, a real-life figure, who attempted a political career, unsuccessfully, after President John F. Kennedy accepted his resignation in November 1961. Walker, an outspoken critic of political figures and members of the government he felt were communist sympathizers – naming, in his accusations, President Harry S. Truman, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and others in government, used his position in the Army to impose his extreme right-wing views and attack those who did not agree with him.  Crossing the line of propriety, not to say prudence, among military figures who desire political power is nothing new. General Douglas MacArthur, also frustrated in political aspirations, was removed from his position by President Truman when he attempted to sidestep the authority of the President and run the Korean War in his own manner, which included his intention to escalate a full-scale war with China.

Adolf Hitler was a soldier in World War I who blamed Germany’s defeat on the politicians, and thought he could run things better, too.

The story in Seven Days in May is fictional, but that it was, and is, entirely plausible makes the movie an important voice not only of those tense days of Cold War crisis when nuclear weapons raised the ante in a war of words with the Soviet Union, but remains relevant today. Nuclear weapons have not gone away. A new demagogue has risen from the dark corners of a free and tolerant society to exploit it. Donald Trump, however, was not a soldier or representative of our arms services. He has declined membership and avoided the draft on several occasions. But he has more support and free range than any false prophet in our history. The lazy, shallow, and inept media, and a moronic legion of extreme right-wing supporters, has allowed this. They even celebrate it.

Though we have seen much in this election year alone to make us jaded, nevertheless I don’t think that keeps us from feeling the power of Seven Days in May, the shock of the characters facing an unimaginable threat to our democracy.  Though it was made at the height of the Cold War, and is set in a vague not-too-distant future of the early 1970s, the theatricality of the movie (it is really a series of “drawing room scenes”); the sharp, literate dialogue; the fast-paced plot; and the stellar acting make this movie as equally relevant today as it is a timepiece from an era when the media wasn’t so much a “loose cannon” as it is today, providing a showcase for other loose cannons.

I first read the novel on which the movie is based when I was in high school, and re-read it before preparing for this post. I understand much more about politics and government, and life, than I did at sixteen – but the eerie chill that something like this could happen remains just as profound in middle age as it did in my teens, but the movie works even simply an entertaining thriller of Cold War intrigue, if one is unaware of how real it is.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, everything in the film is a purposeful tool, right down to the credits which count off to seven numerals superimposed over the Articles in the Constitution. The arrows in the talons of the eagle on the presidential seal, they are weapons. They are a threat – but not to foreign enemies. They also resemble missiles.

We begin with an orderly protest of marchers carrying signs in front of the White House. We, today, might be first struck that the protesters are well-dressed, conducting themselves with cordial dignity. Compared to protest mobs today, it looks like a country club cotillion. We are not sure exactly what they protest, but soon there is a group of counter protesters. They are for the president. They are against the president. They are for a nuclear weapons treaty. They are against the treaty. In another moment, the scene becomes less strange and more familiar to us – the two factions get loud, ugly, and start to beat each other up.

Fredric March is a beleaguered President, who has just signed a pact with the Soviet Union over the use of nuclear weapons. His ratings in the polls has dropped. His doctor warns him about his high blood pressure. He is a man of principle, but he is discouraged and fed up.

Among his confidants is a Southern senator played by Edmond O’Brien, terrific in the role as an acerbic, no-nonsense career politician. He also has a drinking problem, which he recognizes with a mixture of sadness and amusement. Martin Balsam is an adviser. The movie is so jam-packed with the best actors of the day, just picking them out is entertaining.

Burt Lancaster shines as a General of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has come to The Hill to testify to a senate committee that he feels the treaty with the Soviet Union is a bad idea, that it makes our country vulnerable. He makes several impassioned points. “There hasn't been a single piece of paper written in the history of mankind that could serve as a deterrent to a Pearl Harbor. I sometimes wonder why we haven't learned that lesson by now. Every twenty years or so we have to pick ourselves up off the floor bleeding and pay for that mistake. Those mistakes are delivered to us C.O.D. by peace loving men. And bought and paid for with the lives of other men. Men in uniform.”

Kirk Douglas is Lancaster’s aide, a Marine Corps colonel who agrees with Lancaster’s view that the disarmament treaty isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Mr. Douglas will soon become embroiled in a mystery, a political controversy, and inevitable disillusionment in the man he most admires – Burt Lancaster – when he discovers that Lancaster is planning to take over the government and appoint himself as dictator in a military coup.

It begins, innocently enough, when Kirk Douglas discovers betting slips left by the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the coming Preakness horse race. He is amused by this, and especially amused that an admiral is too cheap to cough up a ten-dollar bet.

Soon, the young aide who let this funny gossip slip, as well as the code used by the betters: ECOMCON, has suddenly been reassigned. He’s there one day, gone the next.

An old friend of Douglas, played by Andrew Duggan, is a colonel who has been assigned to a new secret base in Texas, and he confesses to Douglas that he is baffled by the mission for which he and his men are training: not defense, but seizure of the government. Douglas, fearing something is going on behind his boss’s back, keeps his eyes and ears open. We follow him to a Washington cocktail party, where he meets up with Ava Gardner, who happens to be Lancaster’s former mistress, whom Burt has dumped.

We follow Douglas as he tails the car of a firebrand right-wing senator to Lancaster’s home in the middle of the night. We follow Douglas through a darkened parking garage, and through the halls of the Pentagon. We come to understand, as he does, eventually, that Burt Lancaster is plotting to take over the country. Lancaster has established the secret base, unknown to the President and other members of the government, and will take over all the media first, shut them down, and then throw the treaty out.

Douglas, choked by his suspicion, brings it to the President, but neither Fredric March nor his staff believe him at first. Still, they look into the matter.

Edmond O’Brien is dispatched to Texas to find out where this secret base is. He is kidnapped and held in confinement at the base. Knowing his problem with alcohol, O’Brien is brought a steady supply of whiskey to quiet and disorient him, which he heroically pours down the toilet. Andrew Duggan checks on the prisoner, and O’Brien manages to convince him about the plot to overthrow the government. Duggan fires on his own men to free O’Brien in a daring nighttime escape. Then Duggan disappears.

President Fredric March was slated to attend scheduled war games exercises in a secluded bunker with Lancaster, but he declines to go, insisting he is going to go to his fishing camp instead. He doesn’t; he cleverly remains safe at the White House, and it is discovered that Lancaster’s henchmen arrived at the fishing camp on a mission to kidnap March.

Martin Balsam is sent to an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean to obtain the confession of the admiral who knew about the plot, but decline to place his “bet”. He is played, in his acting debut, by John Houseman. A masterful scene, as Houseman squirms, wishing he  had more time. His gentlemanly guilt turns our stomachs.  But the pot is not foiled just yet. The tables are turned when Balsam, signed confession in hand, dies in a plane crash. Houseman will later lie and insist he never signed any confession document.

Douglas is sent to New York to woo and con Ava Gardner out of her love letters from General Burt Lancaster in an attempt to use anything against him to stop him from taking over the government. It is a chore that sickens him.

It’s a nail-biting finish, but an 11^th-hour lucky break for the doomed democracy occurs, and Fredric March, proof in hand, demands the resignations of all the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Lancaster, with that steely-eyed glare that bores through the unfortunate person to whom he is speaking, arrogantly declines, and openly declares his intentions to take charge. He insults the President, and the presidency, and declares war on democracy to get what he wants. 

Their firey exchange:

Lancaster, resplendent in his uniform, his broad shoulders, his ramrod straight posture of a proud, accomplished man. He is filmed from a low camera angle, so he looks even taller, mightier:  “I'm here to tell you face to face, President Lyman, that you violated that oath when you stripped this country of its muscles, when you deliberately played upon the fear and fatigue of the people and told them they could remove that fear by the stroke of a pen. And then when this nation rejected you, lost faith in you, and began militantly to oppose you, you violated that oath by not resigning from office and turning the country over to someone who could represent the people of the United States.”

President Fredric March, sitting, older, looking defeated and horrified, “And that would be General James Mattoon Scott, would it? I don't know whether to laugh at that kind of megalomania, or simply cry.”

Lancaster, addressing himself in the third person, the telltale sign of the depth of his conceit: “James Mattoon Scott, as you put it, hasn't the slightest interest in his own glorification. But he does have an abiding interest in the survival of this country.”

March responds “Then, by God, run for office. You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country, why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect?”

But with evidence in hand, and a still-free press in place, and men in the military—like Kirk Douglas and Andrew Duggan—who may not agree with politicians, but who agree that as military men their purpose is to defend the Constitution and not to circumvent it—Lancaster’s coup collapses. Lancaster accuses Kirk Douglas of being a Judas. “Are you sufficiently up on your Bible to know who Judas was?”

Douglas, at attention, looks him in the eye and answers, calmly, without any passion, “Yes, Sir, I know who Judas was. He was a man I respected and admired—until he disgraced the four stars on his uniform.”

It has been noted that the Pentagon did not want this movie made, but that President John F. Kennedy supported it, through his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and “conveniently” left for weekends at Hyannis so the film crew would be free to film exteriors in front of the White House.

Fredric March offers a summary of the evil of the day: “He's not the enemy. Scott, the Joint Chiefs, even the very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe: they're not the enemy. The enemy's an age, a nuclear age. It happens to have killed man's faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness, and out of sickness a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness. And from this, this desperation, we look for a champion in red, white, and blue. Every now and then a man on a white horse rides by, and we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy, for others it was a General Walker, and now it's a General Scott.”

I would suggest, however, that this is not a sickness specifically of the nuclear age. Hitler’s rise to power was not a product of the nuclear age, nor Napoleon’s, nor any dictator through history who exploited misery, spread lies, and relied upon the ignorance and bigotry of an easily-manipulated populace to steal power. The only distinction between the dictators or would-be dictators of history and Donald Trump is Trump has the advantage of a media enamored of “reality” television, who regards him as entertainment and thus has given him a platform and stature he would not have so easily attained in another age. He has been given a free ride to fame. He has learned through the process that he can do whatever he likes, the more obnoxious he is, the more attention he gets.

The truth is what he decides it will be. His rabid followers will not complain so long as they agree with him. When he goes after them, they will have no one to turn to for help—except any trace of democracy that might be left to shield them.

Benjamin Franklin announced at the close of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 that his colleagues had created “a Republic—if you can keep it.”

President Barack Hussein Obama told the delegates assembled in the same city at the Democratic National Convention this year that “democracy works, but we’ve got to want it.” As regards Trump, the President noted, “We don’t look to be ruled,” he said. “Anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.”

It is up to us to make sure they fail, those “false prophets.”

Returning to that term, for those extreme right-wing fundamentalists who are so fond of looking ahead, almost gleefully, to Armageddon, a warning of “false prophets” occurs several times in the Bible.  We use the imagery of the Bible too much like a Rorschach test, seeing what we want to see.  Look hard and see if you can recognize Donald Trump.

In Matthew 7:15 (quoting from the King James Bible):

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

And from John 8:44:

 He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

This concludes our five-part series on how fascism was depicted in classic films. I would like to conjecture why modern filmmakers don’t cover, intellectually and passionately, the issues of our own times, instead of wiping them away with allegorical stories of space warriors and fictional superheroes. But I don’t know the answer. Perhaps the wish to be “politically correct” has made seeming to take a partisan editorial stance in a film too uncomfortable, leaving one too open to criticism, sort of "damned if you do and damned if you don't," or is just unprofitable. 

Or maybe our society, and especially our movies and media, just needs to grow up.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.