A Single Day in January…

…was all it took to bring fictionalized accounts of Fascist takeovers from supposition to hard cold reality.

Insurrections have been the stuff of fiction since Sinclair Lewis postulated a coup in his classic It Can’t Happen Here. Rex Stout followed, lock step, with The President Vanishes (the basis for William Wellman’s 1934 feature of the same name). Jack London put pen to paper with his own dramatic rendering in The Iron Heel.

Streaming platforms have recently taken Philip K Dick’s classic, Man in a High Castle, and Philip Roth’s, Plot Against America, to wider audiences but for my money nothing rises to the level of John Frankenheimer’s gripping 1964 feature, Seven Days in May. With a script by Rod Serling — based on a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey — the film has a heart pounding immediacy that, given recent events, offers a Nostradamus-like prescience.

Colonel Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey (Kirk Douglas) — an aide to the Joint Chiefs — has one week to unravel a plot he’s stumbled on; one that involves a secret military base in the desert and a plan cryptically referred to as Ecomcon. Masterminding all this is one General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster); unhappy that the Commander-in-Chief — President Jordan Lyman (Frederic March) — is negotiating a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviets. It’s Cold War days when the world stood on the…