American coup d’état

A charismatic, media-savvy US general publicly attacks a president over a disarmament treaty with a dangerous foreign power as a prelude to a coup d’état in this 1964 political thriller.

In John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, Burt Lancaster is U.S. Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, war hero and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Scott uses the right-wing news media that worships him to enflame popular opinion against liberal President Jordan Lyman (Frederic March) over a comprehensive disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.

Apart from a great conspiracy yarn, Frankenheimer and screenwriter Rod Serling also tell a tale about the rule of law. Fascism here is not simply rule by military fiat, but an impatience with and intolerance or misunderstanding of the system by which the US constitution directs government to exercise its authority through the legislative process, courts and elections. 

White House picketers in Seven Days in May.

We first see Scott’s image on signs carried by anti-Lyman picketers outside the White House in a demonstration that quickly turns violent. Jerry Goldsmith’s music heightens the drama and Ferris Webster’s editing gives this black-and-white film a raw, realistic documentary feel.

The story comes from a 1962 bestseller of the same title by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. A concern at that time was that high-profile military men such as General Douglas MacArthur, venerated by the US public after the Allied victory in World War II and leading the crusade against Communist ‘world domination’, would exploit the public’s ignorance of civics with the rhetorical comfort food of square-jawed patriotic talk.

President John F. Kennedy reportedly liked the novel. He discussed with co-producer and co-star Kirk Douglas how it might be filmed and allowed White House access to the production team. But Kennedy never saw the movie. Its December 1963 release date was postponed two months after he was assassinated in November.

Although occasional cranks turn up in the highest ranks, it seems less conceivable then than it does now that a member of the Joint Chiefs, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would grandstand as Scott does here on national television.  

General James Mattoon Scott on national television in Seven Days in May.

Kirk Douglas is Marine Colonel Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey, administrative director of the JCS. Casey respects Scott as his boss but does not agree with his politics; he does not agree with the administration, but abides by its authority. He is not part of the plot. Casey gets wind that something is up on a Monday morning—the first ‘day in May’—when Lt. Junior Grade Dorsey Grayson (Jack Mullaney), a young staff officer, unknowingly quips about an office betting pool among the top brass (which earns him an immediate transfer to Hawaii).

Jack Mullaney and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May.

The betting pool involves the upcoming Sunday running of the Preakness Stakes, an annual horse race held in Baltimore, Maryland, on the third week in May. (The race is run on Saturday, not Sunday. Several background cues address this discrepancy by noting that this is to be the ‘first ever’ Sunday running of the race.) The race date coincides with the date of a top secret alert known only to the president and the JCS.

Through an officer friend, Casey incidentally also learns of a brigade-sized Army Special Forces unit called ‘Ecomcon’ at a secret base called ‘Site Y’ in the desert in west Texas, commanded by signal corps officers. He surmises that Ecomcon is a military acronym for ‘emergency communications control’; he can find no official authorization or funding source for the unit or the base.

Casey kids offhandedly with Scott’s aide about the Preakness pool and gets a terse, angry warning not to discuss the alert or the pool. Scott himself later asks Casey more collegially to keep the pool confidential. Further circumstantial clues implicate a California Senator and a right-wing media broadcaster, among other things. And then the cautious Scott gives Casey ‘the rest of the week off’.

On Tuesday night, Casey visits the White House to share his concerns with President Lyman and his aide Paul Girard (Martin Balsam), who quickly assemble a crisis-management team. Lyman’s skeptical team works round the clock from Wednesday to Sunday hoping to disprove Casey’s hunch, but preparing for the contingency that he is right as more evidence comes to light.

All the president's men strategize in Seven Days in May

The ‘seven days’ are the days from Monday to the Sunday horse race. The action is set in the ‘near future’—May 18 fell on Sunday in 1969 and 1975—but beyond the seven days at issue, chronological time in this story is vague.

 

Lyman in the end calls ‘a whisper’ that the US ‘somehow lost our greatness’ a ‘slander’. But he also earlier rebukes an advisor that neither Scott and the generals, nor the ‘very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe’ are ‘the enemy’.

Frederic March as President Jordan Lyman in Seven Days in May

The enemy, as Lyman sees it, is an age which has ‘killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.’ He said that this produces a sickness which brings about ‘a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness’, and in our 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…now it’s a General Scott,’ the president said.

Seven Days in May 1964 U.S. (118 minutes). Directed by John Frankenheimer; written by Rod Serling, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Chares W. Bailey II; cinematography by Ellsworth Fredricks; music by Jerry Goldsmith; edited by Ferris Webster.

A Touch of Sin

Four ordinary Chinese people, exasperated by homegrown crass materialism, rise against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to vent their opposition in violent but realistic and deeply personal ways. 


In a manner familiar to Western filmgoers in US director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2011), writer and director Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin connects four unrelated narratives with related themes into single story. In the opening sequence, one of the four main characters passes another on a motorbike; other characters appear as the story moves through the Chinese heartland.

This film gives a fascinating and unvarnished local view of how the Chinese heartland looks to a Chinese person. The story is realistically violent, and also beautifully told in pictures. It cannot be an accident that so many shots are composed with images that contrast the old and new Chinas, such as traditional structures and piles of rubble amid new development. Ordinary Chinese themselves, young and old, are portrayed much in the same way. Chinese government people appear in the background, not oppressive but disinterested in people as individuals. The lawless violence and crass materialism may account for why this picture is banned in China, but the visceral reality it captures must have struck an official nerve.

Wu Jiang seeks a reckoning in the wuxia genre film A Touch of Sin.

In several scenes we see well-attended street theater—small but elaborate proscenia set up in rural towns where there are no cinemas—in which actors in traditional costumes appear to be putting on fairy-tale dramas, but which most likely reflect their captivated audiences’ ordinary lives or local events. This gives an insight into what director Jia Zhangke may be doing with his four stories.

There is a popular fiction genre in China known as wuxia, which are fantasy revenge tales involving individual righteous martial arts practitioners fighting oppressors, righting wrongs and exacting retribution for past misdeeds. This genre has a long history, with recent heydays in parts of the 20th century. It is ideal for comic book or graphic novel depiction.

The violence in this film works more like the street plays we see than the gratuitous mayhem of kinetic blood-splattering, flying-through-the-air martial arts action films East and West, though the English title is said to allude to the classic 1971 action picture A Touch of Zen directed by King Hu. In Chinese, the title means ‘doomed fate’. The film is ‘entertainment’ in the sense that it is a blow-valve for expressing in real ways action that an ordinary person might like to take but would not.     

Baoqiang Wang rides into trouble in A Touch of Sin.

Jia Zhangke immediately gets our attention, opening his story with a slight man on an old motorbike, bundled up against the cold in black with a Chicago Bulls watch cap, accosted by three scraggly hatchet-wielding youths on a rural highway under construction…

Each of the four stories, told serially, feature a main character and the people in their lives, all of whom one would guess are easily recognizable to a Chinese audience.


Wu Jiang has a Toshiro Mifune-like screen presence in A Touch of Sin

Dahai (Wu Jiang) is a well-respected man in Wujinshan, a coal-mining town in Shanxi, a rural province west of Beijing. He and his fellow townspeople appear to live lives little changed from the pre-capitalist period, yet their former peers who ‘privatized’ the mine into the Shengli Group now live like rich Westerners. Dahai is a middle aged man with a strong, Toshiro Mifune-like screen presence; an epi-pen and a relatively new army-style overcoat suggest that he may have been discharged from the military for diabetes.

Baoqiang Wang avoids the law in A Touch of Sin.

Zhou San (Baoqiang Wang), the ‘third son’ of a rural family, apparently travels around the country either as a freewheeling bandit or a murderer for hire. His story reportedly is based on that of a real-life bandit, but we just see him kill prosperous-looking people or those foolish enough not to leave him alone. He has sent a lot of money home, but the one ‘robbery’ we see appears to have been done only to conceal a contract hit.       

Zhao Tao and Zhang Jia-yi part in A Touch of Sin.

Zheng Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao, the wife of director Jia Zhangke) works at the Night-Comer Sauna in Yichang, a city in Hubei province in the Chinese heartland. The Night-Comer is a sex business, but Xiao Yu does maintenance, not sex work. She is the longtime lover of Zhang Youliang (Zhang Jia-yi), a well-to-do, middle-aged married man who will not leave his wife to be with her.

Lanshan Luo and Meng Li share a quiet moment in A Touch of Sin.

Xiao Hui (Lanshan Luo) flees a Hunan province sweatshop for a ‘Fortune 500’ sweatshop in Dongguan, an industrial city in Guangzhou province on the outskirts of the world-class international port of Shenzhen near Hong Kong. The Fortune 500 sweatshop turns out to be no better than the first, so a friend connects him with an international tourist hotel in Guangzhou city where he becomes a bellhop with the hotel’s thriving ‘Communist’ sex fetish sideline and meets Xiao Hui (Meng Li as Vivien Li), one of the sex workers, whom he first saw on the train to Dongguan.



Meng Li as a 'Communist fetish' sex worker in A Touch of Sin.

 These characters’ stories are compelling, based on true events, and the storytelling and cinematography is brilliant and worth more than one viewing. 

A Touch of Sin 天注定 (Tian zhuding) China 2013 (129 minutes). Written and directed by Jia Zhangke; cinematography Yu Likwai; music by Giong Lim; edited by Matthieu Laclu and Xudong Lin; art direction by Weixin Liu; sets by Daiyu He.

The Long Good Friday

Like Casablanca, The Long Good Friday is one of those crackpot ideas that brilliantly combines mismatched rights and lefts to produce a classic movie, though here the devil lurks at every twist.

Now considered a vintage 1970s British gangster picture, it was a breakout film for its leads Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Each looks terrific: charismatic young actors with great chemistry which makes them fun to watch working together and leading the rest of the cast.

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren make for great chemistry in A Long Good Friday.

Hoskins plays Harold Shands, an entrepreneurial East End racketeer who has reigned over a decade of peace and mutual prosperity in the London criminal underworld. Mirren is his partner Victoria. Harold is on the verge of parlaying his ‘corporation’ of shady enterprises into a massive legitimate new casino development in London. George Harris (Bryan Marshall), a London city counsellor on Harold’s payroll, has guided Harold through city zoning, planning and regulatory requirements, and Parky (Dave King), a police detective, is Harold’s inside man in law enforcement. The finishing touch is to bring in a silent partner—Mafia money from the US.         


Derek Thompson and Bryan Marshall in A Long Good Friday.

Key story elements are provided in a series of vignettes quickly filleted into the film’s first ten minutes. Two men are seen through the window of a house. Another man leaves a ship with a suitcase, pauses in a car to help himself to a couple-few bundles of £100 notes from inside, delivers the suitcase, and then proceeds to a pub with the driver. And then through the window we watch three men discover money missing from the suitcase; an automatic weapon suddenly breaks the window in. Two men are seized outside the pub and left dead on a rural road. A woman in mourning meets a coffin coming off a train in London. This woman stops at a sidewalk cafe, lifts her veil and spits in the face of one of the patrons, Jeff Hughes (Derek Thompson), Harold’s business aide, who just had finished a working lunch with the city counsellor.

Patti Love as a mysterious angry widow in The Long Good Friday.

Jeff later meets Harold, fresh off the Concorde from New York, at Heathrow Airport. Harold’s focus is on selling his city-approved development scheme to his prospective Mafia ‘cousins’. Jeff assures Harold that everything has been ‘all right’ in his brief absence.

Harold prepares with Victoria to meet ‘the Americans’ on his yacht in the London docklands (the actual location is the St Katharine Docks); his casino development apparently is slated for the Isle of Dogs farther east which Harold says he wants to revive. He pours Victoria a Bloody Mary on a sunny Good Friday morning. Victoria reassures Harold that everything is ready, but wonders whether they should have met their visitors at the airport.

Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins: a Bloody Mary on Good Friday.

‘Naw, play it cool. When the governor of Coca-Cola drops in to London, the Queen doesn't go dashing off to Heafrow, does she?’ says Harold.

‘Queen?’ asks Victoria.

‘Yeah, well you know what I mean. All played up, right? You went to school with Princess Anne, played hockey with her, all that,’ Harold said.

‘It’s lacrosse at Benenden, hockey's frightfully vulgar,’ Victoria replies affectedly.

Harold guffaws: ‘Yes, yes plenty of tha’, yeah. The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they've arrived in England if the upper classes treat them like shit.’

‘Gives them a sense of hist’ry,’ Victoria continues.

To which Harold snorts: ‘Yuh yuh yuh—Yeah.’

Harold meets The Americans: Charlie Restivo (Eddie Constantine) and Tony (Steve Davies).

The Americans arrive: Charlie Restivo (Eddie Constantine) and his consiglière Tony Giamazzi (Steve Davies). Casting Constantine in this role is along the line of Quentin Tarantino later bringing back Lawrence Tierney, a heavy in 1940s and 1950s US crime movies, as Joe Cabot, the criminal boss in Reservoir Dogs (1992). An American-born actor, Constantine had been a fixture in 1950s French crime dramas as Lemmy Caution, a Sam Spade-like private detective character. Not just that: Jean-Luc Godard later cast Constantine to reprise his famous role in Alphaville (1965), his postmodern homage to the detective genre (and also afterward in Allemagne 90 neuf zero in 1991). 

Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution

Harold’s circumstances are confidently luxurious. But things start to go wrong. Colin (Paul Freeman), the man we first see taking money from the suitcase, is Harold’s top enforcer. He is knifed at a public swimming pool pursuing a homosexual liaison with a character identified only as ‘1st Irishman’—Pierce Brosnan in his first film role. A car bomb kills Eric (Charles Cork), one of Harold’s men, waiting in a Rolls Royce outside a church for Harold’s mother (Ruby Head) at her third Good Friday service of the day. And a bomb is discovered at Harold’s Mayfair casino. 

Pierce Brosnan lays a trap in The Long Good Friday.

A pool attendant (Brian Hayes) tells Harold: ‘I've kept it all incognito, they're gonna collect [Colin’s] body in an ice cream van.’ To which Harold replies: ‘There's a lot of dignity in that, isn't there? Going out like a raspberry ripple.’

We learn with Harold that the port at the opening of the story and pub are in Belfast and the farmhouse is in rural Northern Ireland. The woman who spit at Jeff, Carol Benson (Patti Love), is the widow of Phil Benson (Leo Dolan), who was driving Colin’s car in Belfast and later found dead on a Northern Ireland roadside. And whoever is plotting the mishaps is too well informed of Harry’s moves not to have someone inside his operation.


Victoria (Mirren) consoles Harold (Hoskins) on Holy Saturday.  

The rest of this long Good Friday—and most of Holy Saturday—is Harold’s race to solve the whodunit.

The Long Good Friday 1980 U.K. HandMade Films (113 min) directed by John Mackenzie; written by Barrie Keeffe (original title The Paddy Factor); casting by Simone Reynolds; editing by Mike Taylor; music by Francis Monkman; art direction by Vic Symonds; cinematography by Phil Meheux.