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Directed by John Frankenheimer, this film teams with his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate to form a potent one-two punch of Cold War paranoia. The earlier film, with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, boasted a more complex plot and a layer of political satire that’s not found here. That doesn’t make Seven Days in May a lesser film, just a different one with different goals. Continue reading
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It is sad and a bit puzzling that, 80 years after the events that inspired this film, the battle is still going on. In 2005, almost six years into the 21st Century, numerous school district all over this country are attempting to insert the dubious concept of intelligent design into biology textbooks. Despite claims that it represents an alternative theory to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, the primary intellectual thrust of intelligent design never seems to extend past the same anti-evolutionism that led to the passage of the Butler Act which precipitated the actual Scopes Trial.
Inherit the Wind, both this film and especially the original 1955 play on which it was based, were not meant to give a historical account of the Scopes but rather to use it as an allegory for the Red Scare era. Even so, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee used the trial transcript for much of their in court dialogue, so the scenes that focus on the trial itself stay close to the historical record.