The John Frankenheimer story contains one of the great second acts of American filmmaking. The wunderkind who left his Air Force film unit and talked his way into an assistant director's job at CBS established himself as one of the most brilliant talents to emerge from TV's "Golden Age", helming more than 150 live dramas between 1954 and 1960, prestigious contributions like "The Last Tycoon" (starring Jack Palance), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach), the original "Days of Wine and Roses" (Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie), "The Turn of the Screw" (Ingrid Bergman) and "The Browning Version", featuring Sir John Gielgud's first television appearance. Frankenheimer then made a seamless transition to film, inaugurating a collaboration with Burt Lancaster that would span five pictures, and became on the strength of work like "Seven Days in May" (1964), "The Train" (1965) and "Grand Prix" (1966) one of Hollywood's most sought after action directors. Much of his 60s work (as the 1988 re-release of 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate" revealed) has stood the test of time remarkably well, but he floundered during the 70s and 80s before returning to the small screen and reinventing himself as an Emmy-winning director of cable movies and miniseries.
His debut feature, "The Young Stranger" (1957), was an expanded version of a one-hour TV drama he had directed called "Deal a Blow" (1955). A prototypically Frankenheimer picture with its protagonist (young James MacArthur in his feature debut) persecuted by authority figures, the film was well-received, though he personally had a horrible experience. The cameraman would not cooperate and give him what he wanted, and he didn't get along with the producer either. Chagrined to learn that the film producer had much more power to second guess the director than in TV, he happily returned to the small screen and, growing ever surer, became more selective in the assignments he accepted or proposed, showing a flair for adapting the work of celebrated writers like F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, to name a few. Sidney Lumet (his mentor on CBS' "You Are There" series), Arthur Penn and he are arguably the three best directors TV's "Golden Age" produced, and Frankenheimer later stated: "I enjoyed television more than I can really tell you and I think everything I am today I owe to it . . . I drew a tremendous amount of experience from five years as a television director, more I think than many film directors get in their entire career."
In 1961, Frankenheimer directed the taut, visually striking feature "The Young Savages" (1961), adapted from Evan Hunter's novel "A Matter of Conviction". Set in East Harlem and starring Burt Lancaster as an idealistic prosecutor out to save the lives of three innocent gang members, it (like his debut and so many subsequent films) mined the theme of a lone male up against "the system" and was the first of a string of successes that included three movies in 1962 ("All Fall Down", "The Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Manchurian Candidate"). Frankenheimer recruited actual teen gang members for "Savages" and gave Sydney Pollack his first Hollywood job coaching the young non-professional actors. Producer-star Lancaster then called him to take over "Bird Man" from Charles Crichton, and the director elicited an unusually restrained performance from the actor as real-life Robert Stroud, some of whose problems owed to his appallingly possessive mother (Thelma Ritter). Equally destructive examples of the breed, played in both cases by Angela Lansbury, surfaced in his other two movies that year. Ironically, both Lansbury (as the sinister mother of Laurence Harvey in "Manchurian Candidate") and Ritter were nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year, although neither took the prize.
"The Manchurian Candidate" is one of Frankenheimer's finest films, the first he instigated and had complete control over. A tingling Cold War thriller called by Richard Corliss "an eccentric and spectacularly assured tightrope walk between sci-fi and satire, paranoia and prophecy," it gave him the clout to enlarge the scale of his pictures, and he cast around for some time before seizing on "Seven Days in May" (1964) as his next project. Featuring an all-star cast of Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March and Ava Gardner and a screenplay by Rod Serling (adapted from the Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey novel), "Seven Days" told an absorbing, believable story of a military scheme to overthrow the government, perfectly accompanied by the ominous notes of its Jerry Goldsmith score. No sooner had he completed the film when Lancaster called him to Paris to replace Arthur Penn as director of "The Train" (1965), a flawlessly executed adventure story full of spectacular wrecks filmed entirely without models or process shots. Like it or not, Frankenheimer was suddenly in demand as an action director.
His first taste of failure came on "Seconds" (1966), a film which ironically has grown in critical estimation through the years. Although Frankenheimer doesn't rank it among his top six films, he has remarked, "It's the only picture that's gone from failure to classic without having success." Starring Rock Hudson as a frustrated middle-aged businessman who has transformed his identity (thanks to science) only to find himself at odds with his new role, "Seconds" was just a little too "out there" for its time and received a thrashing at the hands of the European critics when it debuted at Cannes. Paramount then panicked and dumped the film, fearing audiences would not respond to Hudson's unusual performance. In light of the actor's personal tragedy, his stepping out of his usual role may have provided some of his most genuine moments on screen as he displayed the anguish, sorrow and regret of a man trying to lead a secret identity. An amateur racer for many years, Frankenheimer derived his greatest pleasure from "Grand Prix" (1966), a technically brilliant actioner featuring an international cast headed by James Garner, Yves Montand and Toshiro Mifune. His first film in color scored well with critics and audiences alike and temporarily restored his damaged reputation.
Things began to unravel for Frankenheimer in June 1968 when his close relationship with Robert F Kennedy ended in tragedy. Kennedy was staying with the director at the time of his assassination at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel and had wanted his friend next to him that fateful night, but Frankenheimer had demurred, thinking the presidential hopeful should not highlight his Hollywood connection. In the aftermath of the slaying, the director plunged into a deep depression. He and third wife Evans Evans moved to Europe, and while he continued to make movies (e.g., "The Fixer" 1968; "The Gypsy Moths" 1969; "The Horsemen 1971), they were not the hits he had enjoyed before. He directed the 1973 version of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" (a personal favorite), which few saw despite good reviews, and showed signs of box-office life with the sequel "French Connection II" (1975), but the commercial failure of "Black Sunday" (1977) pretty much spelled an end to any A-list considerations. Quality scripts did not come his way, and offerings like "Prophecy" (1979), "The Holcroft Covenant" (1985) "52 Pick-Up" (1986), "The Fourth War" (1989) and "Year of the Gun" (1991) hardly seemed the work of the same man who had directed "The Manchurian Candidate".
Frankenheimer had begun an association with HBO on the remake of "The Rainmaker" (1982), starring Tommy Lee Jones and Tuesday Weld, and had subsequently directed an episode of that cable network's "Tales From the Crypt" (1992), but it was the HBO TV-movie "Against the Wall" (1994), about the 1971 prison uprisings at Attica told from a hostage's point of view, which finally provided him the best material he had helmed in years. Although he had received five Emmy nominations for his direction of live TV shows, "Against the Wall" earned him his first statue and his next three TV projects, "The Burning Season" (HBO 1994), the biopic of South American activist Chico Mendes (Raul Julia); "Andersonville" (TNT, 1996), a miniseries about the notorious Civil War prison camp; and "George Wallace" (1997), starring Gary Sinise, all returned him to the winner's circle, giving him four directing Emmy Awards in five years. His TV success refreshed Hollywood's notoriously short memory, and he once again came to the rescue and replaced original director Richard Stanley on "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996), sorting out the chaos and enabling its release.
Frankenheimer returned triumphantly to the big screen in 1998, delivering "Ronin", a sly action masterpiece which featured his trademark--holding a large number of people at different depths in his frames (a technique developed during his live TV days)--and another specialty (a la "Grand Prix"), a fondness for sending vehicles screeching through narrow European streets. "Ronin" (the Japanese word for samurai who have lost their master and must hire themselves out as amoral and dispassionate mercenaries) sets its band of international thugs (including Robert De Niro, Jean Reno and Stellan Skarsgard) in expensive, nonstop pursuit of an oddly-shaped aluminum suitcase (its contents never revealed). Uncluttered by boring details, it showed off its extreme stylishness, the juxtaposition of its script's verbal acrobatics and Frankenheimer's bold visual manner. The man who had redefined the suspense film with "The Manchurian Candidate", who had refused to give up his quest for the elusive big-budget picture, had finally weighed in with a movie that displayed his mastery of the medium.