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"We have met the enemy..." Parallel doves/hawks demonstrations (a peace sign becomes a bludgeoning tool in the ensuing riot) set the stage for the Republic's "week of unadulterated nightmare," a choice Twilight Zone installment, Rod Serling screenplay and all. The President (Fredric March) is a peacenik with plunging ratings, the General (Burt Lancaster) sees the disarmament treaty with Russia as an act of "criminal negligence" and marshals military support for a homegrown coup. Wedged between White House and Pentagon is the Colonel (Kirk Douglas), who "usually steers clear of politics." "Going down the drain while waving the flag" in John Frankenheimer's Washington, D.C., less baroque than in The Manchurian Candidate but just as hazardous. March's diplomatic utopia (tropical murals in an indoors pool) and Lancaster's Cold War bellicosity (phallic missile models lined up on a desk) are the opposing poles in this vision of democracy in peril, which takes note of the screens-within-screens of media coverage, medal-studded uniforms dangling red-meat before audiences, and "the very bad Gilbert and Sullivan" of Capitol Hill. Frankenheimer keeps an ominous tremor subtly coursing through deep-focus corridors and chambers, a sharp edit hopscotches from the lunar El Paso desert to a battleship off the Gibraltar coast. In the human department, there's Edmond O'Brien's choleric wrestling with a bourbon bottle in an Army basement, Martin Balsam's New York quirkiness flashing through a pokerfaced clash with John Houseman, and, above all, the snap of Ava Gardner's wrath as the discarded mistress with incriminating letters. Pakula builds on the underground garage (All the President's Men) and the kidnapping plot in the vast lake (The Parallax View), though the true sequels are best studied beyond the frame, in Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq... With Andrew Duggan, Hugh Marlowe, Whit Bissell, George Macready, Helen Kleeb, and Richard Anderson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |