Impeachment. Charges of sedition. A president with a very low approval rating. Treasonous members of Congress. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leading a movement to oust the president in a coup.
All of those stressful plot points are from director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May,” and ably demonstrate why political thrillers are not only well, thrilling, but also sometimes predictive and all too believable.
That film is one of the best films and greatest paranoid political thrillers in movie history. Each of the films I’ll cite here are not only entertaining bangers but also reflective of – or prescient of – the political turmoil of the time.
Witness what is probably the best-known of those thrillers, “The Manchurian Candidate,” released a full year before the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and eerie in its story of a plot to kill the Democratic Party front-runner for the presidency and replace him with a flag-waving, pro-America populist who is secretly an agent for a foreign power.
These paranoid political thrillers have made a couple of generations of Americans wonder about what high-level machinations are happening while we are, figuratively, sleeping.
Dupes, traitors and heroes
Political thrillers have been a part of movies since movies began. One of the best mid-century examples is “Saboteur,” released in 1942 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Cummings plays an aircraft factory worker who chases a saboteur across country, along the way uncovering a plot by neo-Nazis to unleash domestic terrorism in the United States.
The film is chilling in its depiction of a high-society band of Nazis in their efforts to reach out from their New York mansions and undo America’s efforts in World War II. There’s also a sequence that seems like it was spliced in from another movie when the good guys take refuge with a circus sideshow troupe.
There were plenty of spy thrillers that distinguished themselves in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is the 1960s that remain the golden age of political thrillers and it’s possible to argue that one director, John Frankenheimer, released a one-two punch that’s never been topped in the genre: “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 and “Seven Days in May” in 1964.
