Old Yorker

  • Seven Days in May

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Frankenheimer (1964)

    Released in America fifteen months after The Manchurian Candidate and just two weeks after Dr Strangelove, Seven Days in May has always been overshadowed by those contemporaries.  This is fair enough – it’s much less imaginative than either – but Seven Days is still a forceful political thriller and, like the other two movies, an illustration of how American film-makers in the early 1960s were able to draw on Cold War anxieties to create intelligent and commercially successful cinema.  (Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, also released in 1964 and which I’ve not seen, may be another example.)

    Rod Serling’s screenplay for Seven Days in May is adapted from a 1962 novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II.  The premise is an attempted military coup in the USA, by a group comprising Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior politicians dismayed that the incumbent president has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.  The group’s leader is the charismatic General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancester), head of the Air Force.  His cabal has set up a secret combat unit, based in El Paso, Texas.  They plan to use the opportunity of a government-planned nuclear alert exercise to seize control of the country’s radio, television and telecommunication networks and to oust President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) and his administration.  A week before the alert exercise is scheduled to take place, Colonel Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey (Kirk Douglas) – another Pentagon insider, who reports direct to Scott – gets wind of the existence of the clandestine ECOMCON (Emergency Communications Control) unit.  Although Casey too is strongly opposed to the disarmament pact, which he fears the Soviets will renege on by launching a nuclear attack, he feels compelled to put the White House in the picture.

    There are few surprising and no subversive twists here.  Although the plot is nicely detailed and the melodrama exciting, they lead ineluctably to a finale in which the liberal democratic order not only prevails but is thoroughly vindicated.  President Lyman is so honourable that he stops short of using personal letters obtained by Casey from a Washington society hostess (Ava Gardner) who is Scott’s former mistress, in order to blackmail the General into resignation.  Lyman’s decency is rewarded when, at the eleventh hour, another letter materialises:  a handwritten confession from a navy vice-admiral who knew about the planned coup though he declined to participate in it.  The document is recovered from the wreckage of a suspicious plane crash that killed the President’s aide (Martin Balsam), who had travelled to Europe to obtain the confession.  Scott and his co-conspirators eventually resign midway through a presidential press conference.  As the vanquished Scott instructs his driver to ‘Take me home’, Lyman resumes his press conference with a ringing affirmation of core American values.

    Kirk Douglas, who worked with John Frankenheimer to secure the screen rights to the Knebel and Bailey novel, wrote in his autobiography about an alternative ending to the film that was shot but discarded:

    ‘General Scott … goes off in his sports car, and dies in a wreck. Was it an accident or suicide? Coming up out of the wreckage over the car radio is President Jordan Lyman’s speech about the sanctity of the Constitution.’

    An accident or suicide or even some other cause – to rhyme with the earlier plane crash?   In any event, it’s a pity the film-makers didn’t use this ending, which would have given Seven Days in May an ambiguous sting in the tail.  Like The Manchurian Candidate, the film is made in black and white.  Unlike the earlier film, it’s morally black and white too:  Scott and Lyman are practically the Manichaean candidates.  One is all the more conscious of the films’ differences because Frankenheimer directed them both.  He does a very capable job on Seven Days but from the start he’s imposing threat and fearfulness on the material rather than letting these qualities emerge from it.   Even in the opening credits, the nuclear warhead graphics and the relentless, menacing percussion of Jerry Goldsmith’s score have a strong-arming effect.   There’s plenty of tangy and penetrating dialogue but, unlike George Axelrod’s for The Manchurian Candidate, it sometimes sounds like stage-play dialogue. In the early stages of Seven Days, characters seem to make entrances primarily in order to explain who they are and to register their main personality traits.

    John Frankenheimer is very good, however, both with his actors and in staging set pieces – like the opening fracas between opposing groups of demonstrators outside the White House and, especially, the climactic press conference.  Lyman and the assembled journalists are seen mostly in long shot in the background; television screens in the foreground show the president closer up and are a persistent reminder of the plotters’ aim to take over the airwaves.  Ferris Webster’s editing, unobtrusively fine through most of the film, is noticeably brilliant here.  The communications technology in evidence in Seven Days in May – the television images, the CCTV screens and electronic date-and-time display in the Pentagon building – are particularly evocative of the period.

    As President Lyman, Fredric March’s face shows the strains of office and the fear of what he may have brought on America.  Often at the same time, March’s line readings convey Lyman’s sharp mind and ability to exert his authority economically and decisively.  March’s characterisation is so secure that, even when the President is required to spout wordy, pompous rhetoric, it’s convincing – not merely as political verbiage but as what this politician would come out with.  March, a master actor, gets across how rhetorical fluency increases a speaker’s self-belief and belief in what he’s saying; he expresses no less superbly the ebb and flow of Lyman’s confidence in the Oval Office showdown with Scott.  His delivery of the President’s pronouncements at the press conference is perfectly weighted.  General Scott’s tired, wary appearance at an opening interview with a Senate committee, his bearing throughout and the jagged anger behind his eyes during the big scene with Lyman ensure that Burt Lancaster is often impressive to watch.  He’s never so good to listen to:  the combination of that idiosyncratic speech rhythm and Lancaster’s tendency to surf his lines is a problem (especially when there are so many lines).  It seems from what he wrote later that Kirk Douglas didn’t have a happy time making the film but he gives a very good performance doing what doesn’t come naturally to him.  Casey has to do a lot of listening:  Douglas listens surprisingly well and doesn’t overdramatise the series of moral dilemmas Casey has to wrestle with.  As one of these dilemmas. Ava Gardner has a used, bruised quality that makes her beauty unusually touching.  Edmond O’Brien does a richly entertaining turn as a witty, dipsomaniac senator loyal to President Lyman.  John Houseman’s uneasy gravitas, as the senior navy man whose signature proves so crucial, is just right.  Some of the playing in other small parts isn’t so good – George Macready is particularly awkward as a member of Lyman’s cabinet.

    The first of the President’s grandiloquent outbursts comes when his aides urge him to face ‘the enemy’ and Lyman explains what that enemy is:

    ‘… 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.’

    The ripple of aghast laughter that ran round NFT2 when Fredric March was speaking these words made it pretty clear that people were thinking of the hopelessness of a different age and that this has brought forth the degraded ‘champion in red, white and blue’ who is now the Republican candidate in the 2016 US presidential election.  The script’s mention of ‘General Walker’ reflects a contemporary real-life pertinence.  Edwin Walker, seemingly the inspiration for the General Scott character, was a vehemently anti-Communist senior figure in the US military in the 1950s and early 1960s. His public candour resulted in his falling out first with President Eisenhower and eventually resigning his commission during the first year of the Kennedy presidency, in 1961.  It’s well known that a preview of Dr Strangelove was scheduled for 22 November 1963 and that Stanley Kubrick eventually cut from the film a pie-throwing sequence which included the line ‘Our beloved President has been struck down in his prime’.  That reference to General Walker gives Seven Days in May, the story of attempts to get rid of an elected president, its own startling coincidence in relation to the death of John Kennedy.  In April 1963, Edwin Walker was the intended victim of a failed assassination attempt at his Dallas home.  No arrests were made at the time of the incident.  The gunman was later identified (and confirmed in the report of the Warren Commission) as Lee Harvey Oswald.

    25 September 2016

  • Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jag är Ingrid

    Stig Björkman (2016)

    Ingrid Bergman in her own words and her own pictures.  The words take the form of diary entries and letters to friends, read by Alicia Vikander, as well as excerpts from sound interviews with Bergman herself.  The pictures include interview material too, footage from the sets of films she made and clips from the finished products, photographs and home movies.  Stig Björkman has done a thoughtful and skilful job of assembling and juxtaposing the various verbal and visual material:  the home-movie footage is especially remarkable, both for its abundance and for what that abundance reveals.  From an early age, Ingrid Bergman was intent on the creation of a visible record of her life.  She, in effect, resumed a project that her father – a photographer and artist, who died when she was thirteen – had begun in his only daughter’s infancy.  Bergman’s mother died even earlier, when she was two years old.  She had no memory of the woman whom we see with the toddler Ingrid in a few seconds of grainy, poignant home-movie footage.

    Bergman was old enough not just to remember her father but to express in her diary the fearful misery she was experiencing in the days before his death.  This diary extract, with a montage of family photographs, forms the prologue to Björkman’s documentary.  It also sets the tone for what’s to follow but that tone – created and sustained by Alicia Vikander’s readings and Michael Nyman’s plangent music – becomes gradually more puzzling.  Vikander, although she gets across the throaty quality of Bergman’s voice, is unvaryingly plaintive – even when the words she’s speaking denote a very different mood.   The little girl lost she continues to suggest is sharply at odds with the self-possessed, middle-aged Ingrid Bergman whose own voice we’re also hearing.  Nyman’s music is particularly insistent, and seems overused, when Stig Björkman is describing Bergman’s notorious affair with Roberto Rossellini, the excommunication by Hollywood that followed, and the very part-time motherhood Bergman provided to her son and daughters from both her first two marriages.  The pathetic strain in the narrative may be meant to underline the children’s situation but you get a sense rather that Björkman wants to present his protagonist as forever ill-starred.  Ingrid Bergman experienced terrible loss in her childhood and died rather young, on her sixty-seventh birthday, but it’s hard to accept this conception of her for the years in between.

    A frequent and frequently justified criticism of screen dramas which psychoanalyse their subjects is that the eventual explanations of why these people turned out the way they did seem crudely simplistic.  It’s an irony of the true story Stig Björkman tells that the psychoanalysis of Ingrid Bergman, although it’s hardly complex, is convincing.  You believe the suggestion made that, from childhood, she identified strongly with Joan of Arc – whom Bergman played on screen and on stage – as a solitary young woman with a calling to be special.  The theory put forward that she regarded directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Victor Fleming as father figures – that she saw behind the movie camera the man who photographed her in childhood (and who seems to have developed in her a precocious camera awareness) – rings true.  And Bergman’s maternal limitations resonate with the early disappearance of her own parents.  Pia, the one child of Bergman’s first marriage, to Petter Lindström, notes in a bitterly humorous way that kids aren’t always that ‘interesting’ to adults; but something more particular and disturbing seems to have been going on here.  It’s almost as if Bergman grew to envy her children for having parents – and that this intensified her primary emotional bond with the camera, the object to which she was introduced through the father who died too soon.

    In Her Own Words contains a fascinating episode about the making of Autumn Sonata – the film on which the two great Bergmans of cinema worked together for the only time, and in which Ingrid gave a memorable performance as a world-famous concert pianist accused by her daughter of always putting career before family.  She describes the filming of a sequence in Autumn Sonata in which her character, Charlotte, watches the daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), making a fumbling attempt to play a piano piece.  Ingmar Bergman asked his star what she felt Charlotte was thinking as she listened to Eva’s efforts.  Ingrid replied that Charlotte was experiencing pain and anxiety whenever Eva made a mistake.  Ingmar told her this was wrong: Charlotte was too self-centred to be bothered about Eva’s performance at all; she was moved rather by sentimental nostalgia about being with her daughter when Eva was a young child.  Ingrid replayed the scene as Ingmar dictated but it’s striking that his interpretation clearly wasn’t one that had occurred to her.  Almost needless to say, there’s nothing to suggest that she recognised similarities between Charlotte and herself.

    It’s refreshing to watch a documentary biography of a screen actor that isn’t heavily reliant on clips from their movies or talking heads extolling the subject.  Other than her four children and a relative through Bergman’s marriage to Rossellini, the only people interviewed by Björkman are the film historian and archivist Jeanine Basinger (very briefly), Liv Ullmann and Sigourney Weaver.  The latter had a small part early in her career in a stage production of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, directed by John Gielgud, in which Bergman starred:  Weaver is formally reverential – it’s all ‘Sir John’ and ‘Miss Bergman’.  Ullmann’s contribution is more worthwhile:  she recounts a difference of opinion between the Bergmans on the Autumn Sonata set more explosive than the one described above (but which had the same result:  Ingmar won).  Ullmann and Weaver are filmed together in a trio of actresses:  they sit either side of Isabella Rossellini.

    Among Ingrid’s children, Isabella is by some way the most easily tolerant of her mother’s modus vivendi as they were growing up.  The ease may reflect Isabella’s greater experience and confidence in front of a camera, the tolerance the relatively generous attention she says she received as a child while suffering from scoliosis.  She is certainly the most vivid physical reminder of her mother but she’s less personal and less convincing than her siblings in much of what she has to say.  She claims, for example, that, until she worked with and got to know Jean Renoir in the mid-1950s, Ingrid Bergman had no sense of cinema as a potentially influential form of social comment or critique.  Bergman was very intelligent:  it seems unlikely she didn’t perceive the socio-political nature of Rome, Open City and Paisan, the mid-1940s films which so bowled her over that she wrote Roberto Rossellini to say she’d love to work with him (and even more unlikely they didn’t discuss these things once they were a couple).  The other three children are  less self-aware and more penetrating than Isabella.  It’s perhaps inevitable that Pia Lindström, who was eleven when Bergman’s relationship with Rossellini began, still finds it difficult to conceal the hurt she felt at her mother’s years-long disappearance from her life.   Isabella Rossellini’s twin sister Ingrid and her brother Roberto (he actually resembles Marcello Mastroianni more than he does either of his parents) are acute yet charming contributors.  They also make it importantly clear that their father, to a much greater extent than their mother (and unlike Petter Lindström), was conspicuous by his absence.  Her children are unanimous that, when they were in her company, they adored Ingrid Bergman because she was such fun to be with.  It’s Pia Lindström who insists that a Mommie Dearest-type memoir has always been out of the question.

    The form of Stig Björkman’s film means, however, that it’s increasingly dominated by a woman who is hard to like – she upstages a star actress who was often hard to resist.  This is reinforced by the fact that the pictures marking the beginning and end of Ingrid Bergman’s years in the Hollywood wilderness – Stromboli and Anastasia – are both, in their different ways, bad enough to ensure that excerpts from them can’t compete with the real-life dramas in Bergman’s life with which these films are connected.  (Her own comments on reactions in the USA and Sweden to her relationship with Rossellini are interesting.  She acknowledges shock at the ludicrous intensity of America’s moral censure of her behaviour – there were calls for her films to be withdrawn from circulation on the grounds that to show them was to glorify adultery.   In a Swedish interview, she claims she was most heavily criticised in her home country, although there’s no other evidence of this.)   In Her Own Words is finally impressive because it is what it says on the label.  Björkman’s implied view of Ingrid Bergman as a tragic figure isn’t one that I find persuasive but it’s eclipsed anyway by what Bergman has to say for herself.  She declares herself satisfied that none of her children suffered lasting damage through her absences during their formative years.  There’s no clinching contradiction of this assertion but you don’t need to think like an American reactionary of the early post-war years to feel that Ingrid Bergman, through the confidence of her tone, condemns herself out of her own mouth.  Through having Bergman speak continuously, the film is not a piece of self-justification but an unforgiving exposure of her personality.

    22 September 2016

Posts navigation