John Frankenheimer Essay, Research Paper
John FrankenheimerIn 1969, a critic and biographer of director John Frankenheimer, who has died of a stroke aged 72, wrote: “In the comparatively brief span of 10 years, [he] has become probably the most important director at work in the American cinema today”. This comment was based on a formidable body of television drama and movies, including All Fall Down (1962), Birdman Of Alcatraz (1962), and the political thrillers The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days In May (1964). Yet Frankenheimer’s reputation soon tumbled, and, although his prolific career included successes like French Connection II (1975) and the commercial hit Black Sunday (1977), these were outnumbered by such flops as Story Of A Love Story (1973), poor horror movies such as Prophecy (1979), and thrillers, including the violent 52 Pick-Up (1986) and the risible The Island Of Dr Moreau (1996), which he took over and failed to salvage. Between mega-success, which had him compared with Orson Welles, and eventual rehabilitation, Frankenheimer lived on the Ile St Louis in Paris. He endured years of critical neglect and battled with alcoholism before returning to the US. In a 1990s interview, he detailed his problems with work and drink. This, and television success in that decade, led to a renaissance and his being feted as a survivor in a tough business that had buried many of his contemporaries. He had come full circle, doing his best work – political and social dramas – in television, the medium in which he started, and of which he said, “Everything I am, I owe to it”. Frankenheimer’s mother was Irish, and his stockbroker father German Jewish. Born and brought up a New York Catholic, he was educated at a military academy and at Williams College, Massachusetts. Formidably intelligent, darkly handsome, he had a fitness and determination that allowed him to contemplate a tennis career. Following graduation, however, and having flirted with acting, he abandoned both tennis and his religion, and joined the US air force in the early 1950s. Put in charge of a film unit, he immersed himself in amateur movies, training documentaries and local television work. He continued his childhood enthusiasm for watching films, while reading classic texts on cinema theory and practice. After discharge and a divorce from his wife, Joanne, after 18 months, he landed a job in New York as an assistant director with CBS, becoming one of the noted group of movie-makers who learned their craft in the heyday of American television on documentaries, entertainment programmes and live drama. When Sidney Lumet left the series You Are Here, Frankenheimer took over. It initiated a brilliant period of more than 100 productions, notably Playhouse 90 dramas such as Days Of Wine And Roses (1958), The Turn Of The Screw (1959) with Ingrid Bergman, and The Browning Version (1959) with John Gielgud. In 1957, Frankenheimer directed The Young Stranger, starring James McArthur as a youngster alienated from his parents. The experience was unhappy – Frankenheimer had grown used to controlling his technicians -and it was years before his next movie, The Young Savages (1961). This starred Burt Lancaster, who collaborated on four subsequent, crucially important, Frankenheimer films within eight years. It launched a movie career that allowed the director, a liberal, who wrote and directed all of Robert F Kennedy’s television appearances, to buck the system, and make several landmark social and political works. But later in the same decade, it was that Kennedy assassination – Frankenheimer had driven RFK to the Los Angeles hotel where he was shot – which initiated the director’s deep depression. After The Young Savages, a topical story dealing with urban deprivation, race and juvenile crime, he and Lancaster worked on the mammoth Birdman Of Alcatraz. Lancaster’s performance, and the documentary style, produced an intense story of injustice and endurance. It was delayed when the first section had to be shortened and reshot, and, in the interim, Frankenheimer made the hothouse All Fall Down, with Warren Beatty as an archetypal, Frankenheimer anti-hero drifter. The director’s brilliant knack of casting and choice of crew – he kept key people around him – was never better illustrated than here, and in The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days In May. Now confident enough to dictate his own terms, Frankenheimer’s ebullient ego and chutzpah proved invaluable in dealing with volatile stars, including Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. He and George Axelrod concocted The Manchurian Candidate’s clever screenplay – sparky satire blended on to a tense thriller – and the film is dominated by Frankenheimer’s technical fluency, and the performances, notably by Angela Lansbury, who had served him well in All Fall Down, and was now rewarded with the greatest screen role of her career. Box office receipts, however, were modest, and Axelrod later remarked that the film went from “failure to cult classic without even being a success”. Seven Days In May starred Kirk Douglas as a liberal army officer discovering a planned coup against the president (Fredric March), being organised by a rightwing general, played by Burt Lancaster. Here, the visual style was more complex than its predecessor, and the tone, in the era after America’s red witchhunt days, was even more critical of the right. These were difficult movies to follow, but fate – in the shape of Lancaster’s star power – intervened when Arthur Penn was fired as director of The Train (1964), and Frankenheimer took over a long, but exciting, adventure movie dominated by Lancaster’s athleticism and Paul Scofield’s steely performance as his German adversary. After the shoot in France, Frankenheimer toured Europe, and the year off heightened his disenchantment with the US. He went back there to direct Seconds (1966), before returning to France to make his commercially successful, biggest budget, and first colour movie, Grand Prix (1966). But Seconds was so badly received at the Cannes film festival that he boycotted the press conference. The movie failed at every level; the premise of a man dissatisfied with life, who changes his identity (via a handsome corpse), is unconvincing even as science fiction, and the lengthy, orgiastic, grape-squashing sequence was an embarrassment. European influences were evident in The Fixer, a sombre film about a Russian Jew (Alan Bates) imprisoned for a child murder he did not commit, and refusing to give in to the Czarist regime. Shot in Budapest, it had echoes of Birdman, but, despite intense performances from Bates and Dirk Bogarde, the film was patchily received. Frankenheimer, who thought it his best work, was further disappointed by the response to his whimsical comedy The Extraordinary Seaman (1970), which disappeared under waves of indifference. His final movie with Burt Lancaster, The Gypsy Moths (1969), was a study of disillusionment. Like All Fall Down, its small-town setting was echoed by I Walk The Line (1970), in which sheriff Gregory Peck harboured an impossible love for a local girl. Frankenheimer responded to those interior movies with an adventure, the little seen The Horseman (1971). Then came The Iceman Cometh (1973). Despite Fredric March, Robert Ryan and others, it remains a filmed record of a classic play. It was, however, a prestige success, unlike the ludicrously-titled 99 And 44/100% Dead (1974). His skill with actors earned him a request from Gene Hackman to direct French Connection II, a more thoughtful, character-led thriller than its predecessor. This, and the violent Black Sunday, about a terrorist plan to wipe out 80,000 people at an American football stadium, were more commercially successful, but did not revive Frankenheimer’s career. His subsequent wilderness years yielded little of note. There was the horror movie, The Holcroft Covenant (1985), a reworking of The Rainmaker (1982), the pseudonymously directed Riviera (1987), the brash but little seen Dead Bang (1989), an episode in Home Box Office’s Tales From The Crypt (1989), a poorly scripted The Fourth War (1990), and the opaque Year Of The Gun (1991) – and years of inactivity. The first of his four Emmy-winning television dramas, Against The Wall (1994), based on the 1971 Attica prison uprising, brought Frankenheimer to the fore again; a fine cast and a good script gave him the chance he needed. After George Wallace (1997), another Emmy-award winning documentary-style drama, he made the movie Ronin (1998), with Robert De Niro. Although not a smash hit, it showed his flair for gritty, location-dominated work and for handling actors. Reindeer Games (2000) was a routine thriller, with Ben Affleck. But these were journeyman films, lacking the resonance and excitement that had once made Frankenheimer movies essential viewing. His other Emmys were for The Burning Season (1994) and Andersonville (1996), and he went on to receive many other film awards. His last drama, Path To War, about the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, featuring Michael Gambon as Lyndon Johnson, was shown on Home Box Office two months ago. He is survived by his wife, the actor Evan Evans, two daughters and a grandson. · John Frankenheimer, director, born February 19 1930; died July 6 2002