Just as "Seven Days in May" was hitting our screens, Stanley Kubrick used a superbly over-the-top effort from Sterling Hayden to depict a rogue general who has decided to use all the checks and balances in place to defend the United States to his own mischievous advantage and launch a pre-emptive bombing campaign on those pesky "Ruskies". It's only his perfectly moustachioed British executive officer "Mandrake" (Peter Sellers) who smells a rat, but he is on lockdown in their air force base that is, indeed, being besieged - but not by the "Reds". Meantime, the American President (also Sellers) i... lees die res.