John Michael Frankenheimer (February 19, 1930 – July 6, 2002) was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films. Among his credits were Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), The Train, (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Black Sunday (1977) and Ronin (1998).

He won four consecutive Emmy Awards in the 1990s for the television movies Against the Wall, The Burning Season, Andersonville, and George Wallace, which also received a Golden Globe award. He was considered one of the last remaining directors who insisted on having complete control over all elements of production, making his style unique in Hollywood.

His 30 feature films and over 50 plays for television were notable for their influence on contemporary thought. He became a pioneer of the "modern-day political thriller," having begun his career at the peak of the Cold War.^[1] Many of his films were noted for creating "psychological dilemmas" for his male protagonists along with having a strong "sense of environment,"^[1] similar in style to films by director Sidney Lumet, for whom he had earlier worked as assistant director. He developed a "tremendous propensity for exploring political situations" which would ensnare his characters.^[1]

Movie critic Leonard Maltin writes that "in his time [1960s]... Frankenheimer worked with the top writers, producers and actors in a series of films that dealt with issues that were just on top of the moment—things that were facing us all."^[2]

Early life[link]

Frankenheimer was born in Queens, New York, the son of Helen Mary (née Sheedy) and Walter Martin Frankenheimer, a stockbroker.^[2][3] Frankenheimer once speculated that he might be related to actress Ally Sheedy.^[4] His father was of German Jewish descent and his mother was Irish Catholic, and Frankenheimer was raised Catholic.^[5][6]

He grew up in New York City and became interested in movies at an early age; he recalled going to the cinema every weekend. In 1947, he graduated from La Salle Military Academy in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. In 1951, he graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he studied English. He also developed an interest in acting as a career while in college but began thinking seriously about directing when he was in the Air Force. This led him to join a film squadron based in Burbank, California, where he shot his first documentary. He also began studying film theory by reading books about other famous directors, such as Sergei Eisenstein along with how-to books about the craft of film making.^[1]

In May 2001, amid rumors that he was the biological father of film director Michael Bay, Frankenheimer stated he had a brief relationship with Bay's birth mother. After the rumors surfaced that Bay's natural father was a filmmaker, there was much speculation about Frankenheimer, who continued to deny the story and told the Los Angeles Times that there had once been "tests" to determine paternity (long before DNA testing).

Career[link]

Frankenheimer began his directing career in live television at CBS. Throughout the 1950s he directed over 140 episodes of shows like Playhouse 90, Climax!, and Danger, including The Comedian, written by Rod Serling and starring Mickey Rooney as a ragingly vicious television comedian.

His first theatrical film was The Young Stranger (1957), starring James MacArthur as the rebellious teenage son of a powerful Hollywood movie producer. Frankenheimer directed the production, based on a Climax! episode, "Deal a Blow", which he directed when he was 26.

He returned to television during the late 1950s, moving to film permanently in 1961 with The Young Savages, in which he worked for the first time with Burt Lancaster in a story of a young boy murdered by a New York gang.

[edit] Birdman of Alcatraz

Production of Birdman of Alcatraz began under director Charles Crichton. Burt Lancaster, who was producing as well as starring, asked Frankenheimer to take over the film. As Frankenheimer describes in Charles Champlin's interview book, he advised Lancaster that the script was too long but was told he had to shoot all that was written.

The first cut of the film was four-and-a-half hours long, the length Frankenheimer had predicted. Moreover, the film was constructed so that it could not be cut and still be coherent. Frankenheimer said the film would have to be rewritten and partly reshot. Lancaster was committed to star in Judgment at Nuremberg, so he made that film while Frankenheimer prepared the reshoots. The finished film, released in 1962, was a huge success and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for Lancaster's performance.

Frankenheimer was next hired by producer John Houseman to direct All Fall Down, a family drama starring Eva Marie Saint and Warren Beatty. Because of the production difficulties with Birdman of Alcatraz, All Fall Down was actually released first.

[edit] The Manchurian Candidate

He followed this with his most iconic film, The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer and producer George Axelrod bought Richard Condon's 1959 novel after it had already been turned down by many Hollywood studios. After Frank Sinatra committed to the film, they secured backing from United Artists.

The story of a Korean War veteran, brainwashed by the Communist Chinese to assassinate the candidate for President, co-starred Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury as Harvey's evil mother. Frankenheimer had to fight to cast Lansbury, who had worked with him on All Fall Down, and was just two years older than Harvey. Sinatra's preference had been for Lucille Ball. The film was nominated for two Oscars, including one for Lansbury.

The film was unseen for many years. Urban legend has it that the film was pulled from circulation due to the similarity of its plot to the death of President Kennedy the following year, but Frankenheimer states in the Champlin book that it was pulled because of a legal battle between producer Sinatra and the studio over Sinatra's share of the profits. In any event, it was re-released to great acclaim in 1988.

[edit] Seven Days in May

He followed with another successful political thriller, Seven Days in May (1964). He again bought the rights to a bestselling book, this time by Charles Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel, and again produced the film with his star, this time Kirk Douglas.

Douglas intended to play the role of the General who attempts to lead a coup against the President, who is about to sign a disarmament treaty with the Soviets. Douglas then decided he wanted to work with Burt Lancaster, with whom he had just costarred in another film. To entice Lancaster, Douglas agreed to let him play the General, while Douglas took the less showy lead role of the General's aide, who turns against him and helps the President.

The film, written by Rod Serling, costarred Fredric March as the President and Ava Gardner as a former flame of Lancaster's, was nominated for two Oscars.

[edit] The Train

This film was again taken over from another director, this time Arthur Penn. The Train had already begun shooting in France when star Lancaster had the original director fired and called in Frankenheimer to save the film. As he recounts in the Champlin book, Frankenheimer used the production's desperation to his advantage in negotiations. He demanded and got the following: his name was made part of the title, "John Frankenheimer's The Train"; the French co-director, demanded by French tax laws, was not allowed to ever set foot on set; he was given total final cut; and a Ferrari.

Again saddled with an unfilmably long script, Frankenheimer threw it out and took the locations and actors left from the previous film and began filming, with writers working in Paris as the production shot in Normandy. The poorly chosen locations caused endless weather delays. The film contains multiple real train wrecks. The Allied bombing of a rail yard was accomplished with real dynamite, as the French rail authority needed to enlarge the track gauge. This can be observed by the shockwaves traveling through the ground during the action sequence. Producers realized after filming that the story needed another action scene, and reassembled some of the cast for a Spitfire attack scene that was inserted into the first third of the film. The finished movie was successful, and the script was nominated for an Oscar.

[edit] Seconds

Seconds (1966) tells of an elderly man John Randolph given the body of a young man Rock Hudson through experimental surgery. It was poorly received on its release but has come to be one of the director's most respected and popular films subsequently. The film is an expressionistic, part-horror, part-thriller, part-science fiction film about the obsession with eternal youth and misplaced faith in the ability of medical science to achieve it.

[edit] Grand Prix

He followed Seconds with his most spectacular production, 1966's Grand Prix. Shot on location at the Grand Prix races throughout Europe, using 65mm Cinerama cameras, the film starred James Garner and Eva Marie Saint. The making was a race itself, as John Sturges and Steve McQueen planned to make a similar movie titled Day of the Champion.^[7] Due to their contract with the German Nürburgring, Frankenheimer had to turn over 27 reels shot there to Sturges. Frankenheimer was ahead in schedule anyway, and the McQueen/Sturges project was called off, while the German race track was only mentioned briefly in Grand Prix. Introducing methods of photographing high-speed auto racing that had never been seen before, mounting cameras on the cars, at full speed and putting the stars in the actual cars, instead of against rear-projections, the film was an international success and won three Oscars, for editing, sound and sound effects.

Late 1960s[link]

His next film, 1967's all-star anti-war comedy The Extraordinary Seaman, starred David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney. The film was a failure at the box office and critically. Frankenheimer calls it in the Champlin book "the only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster."

Then came 1968's The Fixer, about a Jew in Tsarist Russia and based on the novel by Bernard Malamud. The film was shot in Communist Hungary. It starred Alan Bates and was not a major success, but Bates was nominated for an Oscar. Frankenheimer was a friend of Senator Robert Kennedy and drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968.

The Gypsy Moths was a romantic drama about a troupe of barnstorming skydivers and their impact on a small midwestern town. The celebration of Americana starred Frankenheimer regular Lancaster, reuniting him with From Here to Eternity co-star Deborah Kerr, and it also featured Gene Hackman. The film failed to find an audience, but Frankenheimer always called it one of his personal favorites.

1970s[link]

He followed this with I Walk the Line in 1970. The film, starring Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld, about a Tennessee sheriff who falls in love with a moonshiner's daughter, was set to songs by Johnny Cash. Frankenheimer's next project took him to Afghanistan.

The Horseman focused on the relationship between a father and son, played by Jack Palance and Omar Sharif. Sharif's character, an expert horseman, played the Afghan national sport of buzkashi. Impossible Object, also known as Story of a Love Story, suffered distribution difficulties and was not widely released. Next came a four-hour film of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in 1973, starring Lee Marvin, and the decidedly offbeat 99 and 44/100% Dead, a crime black comedy starring Richard Harris.

With his fluent French and knowledge of the culture, Frankenheimer was asked to direct French Connection II, set entirely in Marseille. With Hackman reprising his role as New York cop Popeye Doyle, the film was a success and got Frankenheimer his next job, Black Sunday in 1976.

Black Sunday, based on author Thomas Harris's only non-Hannibal Lecter novel, involves an Israeli Mossad agent (Robert Shaw), chasing a Palestinian terrorist (Marthe Keller) and a disgruntled Vietnam vet (Bruce Dern), who plan to blow up the Goodyear blimp over the Super Bowl. It was shot on location at the actual Super Bowl X in January 1976 in Miami, with the use of a real Goodyear Blimp. The film tested very highly, and Paramount and Frankenheimer had high expectations for it. When it failed to become the hit that was expected, Frankenheimer admitted he developed a serious problem with alcohol. In later years, Frankenheimer theorized that the audience may have developed an affinity over the course of the movie for the character played by Bruce Dern and thus felt conflicted when he was defeated at the end.

He is quoted in Champlin's biography as saying that his alcohol problem caused him to do work that was below his own standards on Prophecy (1979), an ecological monster movie about a mutant grizzly bear terrorizing a forest in Maine.

1980s[link]

In 1981, Frankenheimer travelled to Japan to shoot the cult martial-arts action film The Challenge, with Scott Glenn and legendary Japanese star, Toshiro Mifune. He tells Champlin that his drinking became so severe while shooting in Japan that he actually drank on set, which he had never done before, and as a result he entered rehab on returning to America. The film was released in 1982, along with his television adaptation of the acclaimed play The Rainmaker.

In 1985, he directed an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum bestseller The Holcroft Covenant, starring Michael Caine. That was followed the next year with another adaptation, 52 Pick-Up, from the novel by Elmore Leonard. Dead Bang (1989) followed Don Johnson as he infiltrated a group of white supremacists. In 1990, Frankenheimer returned to the cold-war political thriller genre with The Fourth War with Roy Scheider (with whom Frankenheimer had worked previously on 52 Pick-Up) as a loose cannon Army colonel drawn into a dangerous personal war with a Russian officer. It was not a commercial success.

1990s[link]

Most of these 1980s films were less than successful, both critically and financially, but Frankenheimer was able to make a comeback in the 1990s by returning to his roots in television. He directed two films for HBO in 1994: Against the Wall and The Burning Season that won him several awards and renewed acclaim. The director also helmed two films for Turner Network Television in 1996 and 1997, Andersonville and George Wallace, that were highly praised.

His 1996 film The Island of Doctor Moreau, which he took over a few weeks into production from Richard Stanley, was the cause of countless stories of production woes and personality clashes and received scathing reviews. It was said that the veteran director could not stand Val Kilmer, the young star of the film. When Kilmer's last scene was completed it was reported that Frankenheimer said, "Now get that bastard off my set." In an interview, Frankenheimer refused to discuss the film, saying only that he had a miserable time making it.

However, his next film, 1998's Ronin, starring Robert De Niro, was a return to form, featuring Frankenheimer's now trademark elaborate car chases woven into a labyrinthine espionage plot. Co-starring an international cast including Jean Reno and Jonathan Pryce, it was a critical and box-office success. As the 1990s drew to a close, he even acted for the first time, appearing in a cameo as a U.S. General in The General's Daughter (1999).

2000s[link]

His last theatrical film, 2000's Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck, underperformed. But then came his final film, Path to War for HBO in 2002, which brought him back to his strengths – political machinations, 1960s America and character-based drama, and was nominated for numerous awards. A look back at the Vietnam war, it starred Michael Gambon as President Lyndon Johnson along with Alec Baldwin and Donald Sutherland.

One of Frankenheimer's last projects was the 2001 BMW action short-film Ambush for the promotional series The Hire, starring Clive Owen.

Frankenheimer was scheduled to direct Exorcist: The Beginning, but it was announced before filming started that he was withdrawing, citing health concerns. Paul Schrader replaced him. About a month later he died suddenly in Los Angeles, California, from a stroke due to complications following spinal surgery at the age of 72.

Despite the many celebrated films he directed, many of which won Academy Awards in various categories, Frankenheimer was never nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

Filmography[link]

Awards[link]

British Academy Film Awards

• 1964 Train nominated for Best Film - Any Source
• 1962 Manchurian Candidate nominated for Best Film - Both Any Source and British

Cannes Film Festival

• 1966 Seconds nominated for Competing Film
• 1962 All Fall Down nominated for Competing Film

New York Film Critics Circle Award

• 1968 Fixer nominated for Best Direction
• 1968 Fixer nominated for Best Film

Venice Film Festival

• 1962 Birdman of Alcatraz nominated for Competing Film
• 1962 Birdman of Alcatraz won for San Giorgio Prize

Further reading[link]

• Mitchell, Lisa, Thiede, Karl, and Champlin, Charles (1995). John Frankenheimer: A Conversation with Charles Champlin (Riverwood Press). ISBN 978-1-880756-09-6.
• Armstrong, Stephen B. (2008). Pictures About Extremes: The Films of John Frankenheimer (McFarland). ISBN 0-7864-3145-8.

References[link]

External links[link]

• John Frankenheimer at the Internet Movie Database
• John Frankenheimer OpsRoom.org
• John Frankenheimer, Senses of Cinema, Issue 41 "Great Directors Series"
• Interview with John Frankenheimer video TV Legends, 28 minutes
• John Frankenheimer at Find a Grave
• John Frankenheimer's The Extraordinary Seaman – How Bad Could It Be? (Movie Morlocks)
• Literature on John Frankenheimer
• John Frankenheimer: The Hollywood Interview