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John Frankenheimer (1930-2002) |
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American film director, an expert in thrillers. John Frankenheimer started his career in live television dramas in the 1950s and then established himself as one of the Hollywood's leading talents. Several of his films are based on books, written by such diverse authors as Evan Hunter, Richard Condon, Robert Ludlum, Bernard Malamud, and Elmore Leonard. Frankenheimer's best films include The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a suspense film of political intrigue, and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), almost a documentary set in Alcatraz. "Many of my films concern the individual trying to find himself in society and trying to maintain his individuality in a mechanised world. I do feel that society wants everybody to be exactly the same. It's so much easier. I think the theme of the indomitability of the human spirit is very much there, and the fight against regimentation." (Frankenheimer in The Cinema of John Frankenheimer by Gerald Pratley, 1969) John Frankenheimer was born in New York, the son of Walter Frankenheimer, a German-Jewish stockbroker, and Helen (Sheedy) Frankenheimer, an Irish Catholic. Frankenheimer attended La Salle Military Academy where he was one of the best tennis players and the captain of the tennis team. After quitting tennis, he took up amateur automobile racing. At Williams College he studied English, graduating with a B.A in 1951. Frankenheimer had become interested in acting at the college, and for a year he acted in summer stock. Eventually he dropped acting on account of shyness. While serving in the
Air Force, Frankenheimer learned the fundamentals of film technique and
made several document shorts white stationed in Burbank, California.
"Of course I made some terrible movies, but I did learn what I was
doing, at the Government's expense," he later recalled. (The Cinema of John Frankenheimer by Gerald Pratley, 1969, p. 19) Frankenheimer's first wife was Joanne Evans, with whom he moved to Washington D.C., and then to southern California. The marriage was an arrangement of convenience – at that time they were living together and the only way he could take her with him was to marry her so that the governmet would pay for it. After divorce he married in 1954 Carolyn Miller; they had two children. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1961 Frankenheimer married Evans Evans, who acted in his 1962 feature film All Fall Down. Evans appeared in small supporting roles in several of Frankenheimer's following films. Encouraged by John Ford, he decided to pursue television as a career. After his demobilization Frankenheimer began to work for CBS-TV in New York as assistant director. He was paid $400 a week, a lot of money for a young assistant, who was mostly behind the camera. Soon he was promoted to director on the 'You Are There' program, hosted by Walter Cronkite. During this period Frankenheimer directed for 'Climax' and 'Playhouse 90' anthology series. His dramas included adaptations from Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.These productions earned him 14 nominations for Emmy Award and he won twice the television critics award as best director. Having done over 125
television shows, Frankenheimer was more than ready to make films for
the big screen. "When we were coming out of live television in the
1950s, there was this bum rap that we couldn't direct a wide-screen
shot in a big movie. But what we were doing was so highly technical
that it was far more demanding than what you do in a movie." ('John Frankenheimer,' in They Made the Movies: Conversations with Great Filmmakers by James Bawden and Ron Miller, 2023, p. 99) Frankenheimer's first motion picture was the low-budgeted
The Young Stranger (1957), starring James MacArthur, James Daly
and Kim Hunter. Its screenplay was written by Robert Dozier. The
reviews were fairly good but the film did poorly at the box office. In The Young Savages (1961), a story of juvenile criminals, based on Evan Hunter's novel A Matter of Conviction, Frankenheimer started his collaboration with Burt Lancaster. The actor played in Birdman of Alcatraz
Robert Stroud, a murderer and a real life character, who becomes in
jail the world's leading authority on caged bird diseases. This film was
not a huge success in cinemas, but become popular in television.
Frankenheimer had heated arguments with Lancaster about how to shoot
scenes, and after finishing the film he swore he'd never work with him again. Two years later he made with Lancaster and Kirk Douglas Seven Days in May, a story of an attempted right-wing military coup. Based on the best-selling cold war novel published by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey II it continued Frankenheimer's examinations of America's political intrigues. President Kennedy helped persuade United Artists to finance the film. He also lent White House locations for it. In this film Frankenheimer had problems with Ava Gardner, who accused after a few drinks that the director had a homosexual relationship with Douglas. "Listen, I've known Ava for years," said Douglas to Frankenheimer. "She must be just a little high." (from The Ragman's Son by Kirk Douglas, 1989, p. 352) The Manchurian Candidate was based on the prophetic novel of Richard Condon. Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) are Korean war heroes, who have been brainwashed during their captivity by scientists from the Pavlov institute. Shaw is conditioned to kill, his target is the Presidential nominee. His domineering mother, Angela Lansbury, turns out to be a dedicated Communist. She is married to a U.S. senator, John Yerkes Iselin, clearly based on Joseph McCarthy, the famous anticommunist crusader. At the end, in the Madison Square Garden, Shaw shoots his mother, his stepfather, and himself. The popular belief that many American soldiers had succumbed to brainwashing in the Korean war contributed to the fame of the film. In addition it was rumored that Lee Harvey Oswald has seen The Manchurian Candidate before assassinating President Kennedy. The film was pulled from circulation for over twenty years. It began its comeback in 1987 when it was shown at the twenty-fifth New York Film Festival. Frankenheimer started to work in the mid-1960s in Europe, where he directed such films as The Train (1964), about the French Resistance trying to sabotage a plan to transport a cargo of priceless art treasures to Germany, Grand Prix (1966), his first colour movie, and The Fixer (1968), a tale of anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia, which was scripted by Dalton Trumbo from Bernard Malamud's novel. After completing The Train, Frankenheimer moved with Evans to a Paris flat. Seconds
(1966) was so badly received at the Cannes film festival that
Frankenheimer boycotted the press conference. The turning point in Frankenheimer's personal life was the tragedy of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, his friend. Kennedy had stayed at the director's Californian home the night before he was assassinated while running for president, in 1968. Moreover, he drove Kennedy to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the fatal shots were fired. Critics noted the decline of Frankenheimer's work already before The Gypsy Months (1969), an existential interpretation of the Icarus myth. The director had started to drink and suffered from depression. 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), starring Richard Harris and Chuck Connors, was a failure. Later the Italian director Sergio Leone claimed that Frankenheimer practically stole his idea of a cemetery under the water of the Hudson River and used it at the beginning of his movie. Frankenheimer himself was not happy with his side-step into comedy and planned a permanent return to "semi-documentary realism." With the exception of The French Connection II (1975), a mediocre sequel to William Friedkin's original police thriller, and Prophecy (1979), Frankenheimer's films from the 1970s were commercial disappointments. Black Sunday (1977) is famous for its editing – 181 cuts in the final three minutes. The sequence, set over 80,000 spectators of the Super Bowl, shows a deadly airship, pursued by an Israeli secret agent on a rope beneath a helicopter. The Challenge (1982), a story of a blood feud over two antique swords, was shot for the most part in Kyoto. Frankenheimer's alcoholism expanded on the set. After he returned to the United States, he went into detox program. The Holcroft Covenant (1985), a screen adaptation of Robert Ludlum's paranoid thriller, revealed again plans to build a new Nazi empire. The British actor Michael Caine played a naive New Yorker and had to bury his famous Cockney accent for the role. "If you are British and do a picture that is going to be shown in the States, speak slower," Caine said in his book on acting and filmmaking. "I've trained myself to speak very slowly, and Americans accept me, even in an American part." (Acting in Film by Michael Caine, 2000, p. 77) Reviews were poor: "This muddled thriller is seemingly aimed at cinemagoers fearful of a fourth Reich. Various scripters have not created a clear narrative line out of Robert Ludlum’s complex potboiler novel." (Variety, December 31, 1984) 52 Pick-Up (1986), produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, was a screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel. Two years earlier the blackmail story had been filmed in Israel as The Ambassador. In the 1990s Frankenheimer returned again to television. He won an Emmy award for directing HBO's Against The Wall (1994), a retelling of the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Kyle MacLachlan played a prison guard and Samuel L. Jackson was a Muslim convict leader. The Burning Season (1994) was awarded with three Golden Globes and Emmy for directing. His third Emmy Frankenheimer won for Andersonville (1996), and fourth for George Wallace (1997), which also received the Golden Globe for Best Film for Television. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) the director Richard Stanley was sacked after three days and Frankenheimer continued the unlucky horror film. In the bizarre adaptation of H.G. Wells' "scientific romance", Marlon Brando was cast in the role of a geneticist who is destroyed by his own creations. Brando was tough to work with, and Frankenheimer said later that "If I was penniless and desperate and the only job available was working with Brando, I'd rather lie down in the gutter and die." (Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson by Robert Sellers, 2010, p. 296) Ronin (1998), shot in Europe, was a violent chase thriller, built around a Hitchcockian McGuffin, a briefcase. Noteworthy, the audience never learns what it contains, except that it is the thing that everyone wants. Before his death, Frankenheimer had began to work on Exorcist: The Beginning, but was forced to quit the movie. For years, he had suffered from lung cancer, which had spread to his spinal chord and vertebrae, and in May 2002 he went into the hospital for reconstructive back surgery. In June, he returned to the hospital. Frankenheimer died of a stroke in Los Angeles, on July 6, 2002. His last theatrical release was Reindeer Games (2000) with Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron. Roger Ebert called it the "first all-Talking Killer Picture." Path to War (2002), an HBO television movie, expressed Frankenheimer's sympathy toward President Lyndon Johnson, whom he saw as a "modern-day King Lear." For further reading: The Cinema of John Frankenheimer by Gerald Pratley (1969); John Frankenheimer: A Conversation With Charles Champlin by Charles Champlin (1995); Andersonville: The Complete Original Screenplay by David W. Rintels, et al. (1996); The Films of Frankenheimer: Forty Years in Film by Gerald Pratley, John Frankenheimer (1998); 'The Machurian Candidate' in Film: The Critic's Choice, edited by Geoff Andrew (2001); Pictures About Extremes: The Films of John Frankenheimer by Stephen B. Armstrong (2007); A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (2011); 'John Frankenheimer,' in They Made the Movies: Conversations with Great Filmmakers by James Bawden and Ron Miller (2023) Selected films:
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