[Seven Days in May] had a freshness and suspense of melodrama to recommend it and was a great popular success;… [Convention], however, is corny and mechanical, and at times it seems an echo of Mr. Vidal's play [The Best Man]….

To [various] stock villains the authors have added another that is bound to become a staple of the new political thriller: a computing machine used to store data of the most personal kind on the delegates so that they can be shamelessly pressured into voting the way the big bosses, big business, and big labor, miraculously banded together, want them to. In their serenade to political virtue, Messrs. Knebel and Bailey have pulled out all the stops, but the notes are sour.

William Barrett, "Problems of Power," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1964 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), Vol. 213, No. 4, April, 1964, pp. 146-47.