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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 8/30/2025

John Frankenheimer

John Frankenheimer had one of the best short runs for a director I can think of. From 1962 to 1966 he made Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train, Seconds, and Grand Prix. Six movies in five years that have stood the test of time and people look back on more than just fondness. At least one of these (The Manchurian Candidate) is outright iconic.

But Frankenheimer's career continued until 2002. For nearly 40 years after what could be called his Imperial Period, he made movie after movie on a general pattern of one every 18 months or so, and only one, Ronin, seems to have any cultural purchase at all. What was he doing for those nearly 40 years? What movies did he make? Was he the driving force on any of them?

Well, Frankenheimer's career is a complex one. I divide it up into four periods, each with its own internal creative impulses that demonstrate the complexities of the collaborative medium that is cinema. What sets Frankenheimer apart from many others, though, is that his best known period, his early period, might be the least reflective of who he wanted to be as an artist.

Movie Stars

Frankenheimer trained to be a director on network television in the 50s by directing live drama, a combination of dramatic theater and director's showcase that gave Frankenheimer a forum to hone his technical skills, especially around complex visual compositions. He had one film, The Young Stranger in 1957 that made it to theaters in the middle of this, but it's effectively just a teleplay with a slightly larger budget and released in theaters (I found it to be a hidden gem of the career overall, to be honest). His feature film career didn't really begin until The Young Savages in 1961, produced by Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions.

Burt Lancaster was one of the most important independent producers of the late 50s and early 60s. With his producing partner Harold Hecht, they even won the Best Picture Oscar in 1955 for Marty, and Lancaster was well-known for overbearing behavior on set. He actually fired two directors on two films that Frankenheimer directed for him (Charles Chrichton on Birdman of Alcatraz and Arthur Penn on The Train). He was obviously a presence who made sure that people were achieving his vision, no matter who the director was. Lancaster had this kind of presence on three of these films (Savages, Birdman, and The Train).

Of the remaining four films of this five year period previously highlighted, one was dominated by another movie star, Seven Days in May with Kirk Douglas who also had a reputation for overbearing control over his films (he fired Anthony Mann on Spartacus and hired Stanley Kubrick in Mann's place). If there's one film in this period that could be most considered Frankenheimer's like any other director, it'd be The Manchurian Candidate something of a passion project for both Frank Sinatra, star, and the head of United Artists, Arthur Krim. However, in the middle of this period dominated by Lancaster and Douglas and immediately after his network television work, it makes you wonder if he was there mostly just to technically deliver the film.

I don't think Frankenheimer developed the nascent skills to exert creative control over a film in his apprenticeship in network television. I think he saw himself as a tool to the writer and the actors to help rather than a guiding light. He was a technically proficient filmmaker who might have just gotten lucky with a string of films.

Independence from...the Independents


Frankenheimer's first period, that star period, ends in 1965 with The Train. Starting with Seconds starring Rock Hudson in a typecast-breaking role, it shows Frankenheimer operating with fewer overarching influences over his films and a greater embrace of experimentation.

Now, it's obvious from the first sequence of The Young Savages that Frankenheimer saw his job as director to get interesting angles. Together with his cinematographer, Lionel Lindon who worked with Frankenheimer on five films, he created swirling realities, like the garden society sequence in The Manchurian Candidate that pushed the bounds of perception and subjectivity in film. With greater freedom of the production without the overbearing nature of Lancaster or Douglas, the experimentation essentially became the point. Seconds is about a man who gives up his life through surgery and a faked death to find meaning far from his old life, and it's all told in these exaggerated lens choices and angles with a lot of editorial complexities that I find engrossing.

And then there's Grand Prix, what could arguably be called his magnum opus, a look at the F1 circuit (using F3 cars for production safety reasons) through the eyes of several racers, the entire film is an experiment in editing. Each of the five races shown is edited in completely different ways to reflect the subjective perspectives of individual racers. It's something of a tour-de-force from a directorial and editing perspective, and it's Frankenheimer at the forefront of his film in ways that he rarely was.

Because, his movies rarely made money, especially in this period. Grand Prix made some ($20 million off a $9 million budget), but his follow up, an adaptation of Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, bombed horribly, as did The Extraordinary Seaman, The Gypsy Moths, I Walk the Line, The Horseman, 99 and 44/100% Dead, and, most importantly, Impossible Object.

Reading up on Frankenheimer, people often mark the change in his career with The Gypsy Moths, the film he made immediately after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Frankenheimer was actually outside the Ambassador Hotel, waiting to pick Kennedy up and drive him to his next destination, when Kennedy was assassinated. It's obvious that this event had a marked impact on Frankenheimer (the ending of The Gypsy Moths is just...nihilistic), but I think the more important change was in Frankenheimer's efforts to be independent, and they just don't work. Most of these films are not good (I think I Walk the Line is actually a hidden gem, but it's an exception), and they show me a filmmaker who simply never learned how to be the primary creative on a set given the job and not really realizing this key component.

Studio Hatchet Man


I could feel the exact moment that Frankenheimer simply gave up, and it was the start of French Connection II. To understand why John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate, decided to direct a sequel to William Friedkin's Best Picture winner, you have to look at Impossible Object.

It almost seems unfair, but I think Impossible Object may be the one film to define who Frankenheimer wanted to be as a filmmaker. It's an experimental film about an American writer in Paris who starts an affair with a younger woman, interspersed with Fellini/Pasolini-like fantasy sequences of the main character frolicking with Hippolyta. It feels like Frankenheimer rushed into the production because he could play with time and reality without figuring out the actual story itself. And it bombed. It was only released in France (where Frankenheimer lived after Kennedy's assassination) and went no further. Crestfallen at its failure, Frankenheimer decided to take the job of French Connection II, which he could film in Marseille.

And that starts the longest period of his career where he just made studio schlock for about fifteen years. Some of this is decent, like Black Sunday, the adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl, but mostly they're just...lifeless works. Things like Prophecy, a Jaws ripoff about a killer bear in the Maine forests, or The Challenge, an West goes East movie about a man who decides to get in the middle of a Japanese familial fight, or Dead Bang, a dull thriller starring Don Johnson, or The Fourth War, a Cold War thriller about two commanders on opposite sides with no one else to fight but each other that's far more pretentious than it has any right to be.

I call this period the Studio Doldrums because it's obvious, even at the basic filmmaking level, that Frankenheimer simply didn't care. Framing isn't nearly as interesting, even, the one visual defining feature of his. Part of this is probably because he wasn't working with Lindon as DP anymore, but even without Lindon, on something like I Walk the Line where he worked with David M. Walsh as his DP, he got those interesting angles. Really, this feels like John Huston's "tired period" (a phrase coined by Vincent Canby for Huston), where Frankenheimer just showed up to manage the set without really caring.

An Intermission


There are two films in the middle of Frankenheimer's filmography that don't really fit. They are film adaptations of two well-respected stage plays, The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill and The Rainmaker by N. Richard Nash, and they feel like deep breaths of relief from Frankenheimer.

He even said that production of The Iceman Cometh was the most fun he ever had on set because it was like working with a repertory company. And then, shortly after production on The Challenger, in one of the longer dry-spells of his career, he made The Rainmaker with a young Tommy Lee Jones as the titular conman. It's purported to be just a production on a stage with an audience, but the placement of the camera throughout indicates that they were filmed differently (I assume that a real production for the on-screen audience did happen and that Frankenheimer directed that as well, though I have no documentary evidence of it).

What are these things? They feel like a return to normal: actor-focused adaptations of plays where writer is king and Frankenheimer could focus on performance and his camera without worrying about the overall product.

Considering the output he was regularly doing, where the end-products weren't very good stemming from problematic scripts at the beginning, I can see Frankenheimer would have been happier just stepping away from cinema and directing theater for a while, but he didn't.

Return to Television


It pleased me to discover that Frankenheimer did have a resurgence, but it mostly happened on television. I don't want to say that it went unnoticed because he won four Emmys for Best Director of movies/mini-series in this period, but I had never really thought about this television work as being worthy of note. Perhaps that stems from a certain snobbishness on my part regarding the television/cinema divide, but I made sure to discover these when I decided to take on Frankenheimer's body of work.

And some of his best stuff is here. There are still questions of authorship, the prime example being Andersonville, something of a passion project for its billionaire producer Ted Turner, but with things like the HBO movies Against the Wall, about the Attica Prison riot, The Burning Season, about Chico Mendes, and, most importantly, the dual miniseries George Wallace and Path to War (Gary Sinise, who plays Wallace in the former, has a short scene with Michael Gambon, who plays LBJ, in the latter as Wallace again), he was once again at the top of his game.

These last two, biographies of prominent political figures in the 1960s and early 70s, feel like the real passion projects in Frankenheimer's career. Deeply researched, surprisingly touching (especially Wallace), and well-made, they may not be the pinnacle of his career in terms of quality (I love The Train a lot), but they do show Frankenheimer at his most engaged from beginning to end.

Of course, in the middle of this, just to muddy things up, are three theatrically released feature films: The Island of Dr. Moreau, Ronin, and Reindeer Games. Two of these are bad, and then there's Ronin, something of a combination of Grand Prix from a technical perspective and the thrillers Frankenheimer made his name with. However, the other two, especially Dr. Moreau, where he was brought in to take over filming after the studio fired Richard Stanely after three days of production, feel like they would rest more comfortably in his previous, Studio Hatchet Man period. He had to pay the bills, I guess. That's not to denigrate Ronin, which is very good (check out Mark's take, which is effusive in praise), but all three kind of just feel like jobs he took, not projects he was really passionate about.

A Career in Retrospect


So, what do you make of a career this...all over the place? Who is the real Frankenheimer?

Is he his best movies, even if they were dominated by other personalities? Are they his independents period when he had the most control but also the least success? Is it him in autopilot for studios? Is it his resurgence when he rediscovered some love of the form, even if on television instead of in the theaters?

If forced to pick a film that exemplified him most, I'd struggle. I'd be torn between a few things, Seconds, Grand Prix, Impossible Object, and George Wallace. All represent certain levels of his experimentation (George Wallace does interesting things with film stock and color to differentiate private moments from historical ones), but they come from different periods when he was trying different things. If I was being generous, I think I'd say Grand Prix. If I was feeling mean, I'd say Impossible Object.

However, I think I'd end up settling on George Wallace. Frankenheimer was obviously political, so picking one of his political films seems appropriate. There's experimentation. There's a deep focus on the actor (Sinise is honestly just great in the role). There are thriller elements, especially around the assassination attempt that leaves Wallace crippled. It might be the fullest package of what Frankenheimer wanted to do with the most control himself.

Or maybe it's The Manchurian Candidate. I dunno.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Caught Stealing

The Toxic Avenger

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Fourth War (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "It's not a good film. It has some decent thriller elements, but they're few and far between. At least the acting is decent." [Amazon Prime]

Against the Wall (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Really, this is quality stuff from Frankenheimer, his best movie in literally decades, and the best use of his skill. It's obvious to me that he wanted to be an artier director, but he's really better as the socially conscious thriller filmmaker." [Library]

The Island of Dr. Moreau (Rating 1/4) Full Review "So, it's bad. It's mostly kind of dreary bad, though." [Kanopy]

Andersonville (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Being based on the journals of a real Union soldier kept at the camp, John Ransom, it ends up feeling more like a recreation of the major events he witnessed rather than a story for the screen. However, within those strictures, I think it's a largely compelling and well-assembled recreation." [Library]

George Wallace (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a really quality biopic, and I don't say that often." [Library]

Ronin (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "John Frankenheimer makes a Michael Mann movie, and he does it very well." [Personal Collection]

Reindeer Games (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "It mostly just spins its wheels and feels like it's a few drafts away from being a shootable script. This was not a good way for Frankenheimer to stop making feature films." [Amazon Prime]

Path to War (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, on the whole, it's mostly an accomplished document of the large events of the Vietnam War through the eyes of the Johnson White House." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 9/20, and it will be about the directing career of John Hughes.