1957: The Young Stranger; The Comedian (for TV). 1958: Days of Wine and Roses (for TV). 1959: The Turn of the Screw. 1961: The Young Savages. 1962: The Manchurian Candidate (+co-producer, co-scenarist/scriptwriter); All Fall Down; Birdman of Alcatraz. 1964: Seven Days in May. 1965: The Train. 1966: Grand Prix; Seconds. 1968: The Fixer. 1969: The Extraordinary Seaman; The Gypsy Moths. 1970: I Walk the Line; The Horsemen. 1973: L'Impossible Objet (Impossible Object; Story of a Love Story); The Iceman Cometh. 1974: 99 44/100% Dead (retitled Call Harry Crown for general release in U.K.). 1975: French Connection II. 1977: Black Sunday (+bit role as TV controller). 1979: Prophecy. 1982: The Challenge (Sword of the Ninja). 1985: The Holcroft Covenant. 1986: 52 Pick-Up. 1987: Across the River and Into the Trees; Riviera (for TV) (as Alan Smithee). 1989: Dead Bang; The Fourth War. 1991: Year of the Gun. 1994: Against the Wall (for TV); The Burning Season (for TV) (+co-producer). 1996: Andersonville (for TV) (+ex producer); The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1997: George Wallace (for TV) (+producer). 1998: Ronin. 2000: Reindeer Games. 2001: Ambush. 2002: Path to War (TV) (+producer).
1999: The General's Daughter (role).
Assistant director, later director, CBS-TV, New York, 1953; television director, Danger, Climax!, Playhouse 90, Hollywood, from 1950; directed first feature, The Young Stranger, 1957; formed John Frankenheimer Productions, 1963; directed episode of Tales from the Crypt, 1989.
Christopher Award, 1954; Grand Prize for best film direction, Locarno Film Festival, 1955; Emmy Award for Directing for a Miniseries or a Special, The Burning Season, 1994.
Malba, New York, 19 February 1930.
La Salle Military Academy, graduated 1947; Williams College, B.A., 1951.
Served in newly formed Film Squadron, U.S. Air Force, 1951-53.
Married Carolyn Miller, 1954 (divorced, 1961), two daughters; remarried, 1964.
The seven feature films John Frankenheimer directed between 1961 and 1964 stand as a career foundation unique in American cinema. In a single talent, film had found a perfect bridge between television and Hollywood drama, between the old and new visual technologies, between the cinema of personality and that of the corporation and the computer.
Frankenheimer's delight in mono-chrome photography, his instinct for new light cameras, fast stocks, and lens systems like Panavision informed The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Seconds with a flashing technological intelligence. No less skillful with the interior drama he had mastered as a director of live television, he turned All Fall Down and The Young Savages into striking personal explorations of familial disquiet and social violence. He seemed unerring. Even Birdman of Alcatraz and The Train, troubled projects taken over at the last minute from Charles Crichton and Arthur Penn, respectively, emerged with the stamp of his forceful technique.
Frankenheimer's career began to sour with Seconds, a film that was arguably too self-conscious with its fish-eye sequences and rampant paranoia. Grand Prix, an im pressive technical feat in Super Panavision, showed less virtuosity in the performances. His choices thereafter were erratic: heavy-handed comedy, rural melodrama, a further unsuccessful attempt at spectacle in The Horsemen, which was shot in Afghanistan. Frankenheimer relocated in Europe, no doubt mortified that Penn, Lumet, and Delbert Mann, lesser lights of live TV drama, had succeeded where he failed.
Despite a career revival with the 1975 French Connection II, a sequel that equalled its model in force and skill, Frankenheimer has not hit his stride since. The director's choices remain variable in intelligence, though by staying within the area of violent melodrama he has at least ceased to dissipate his talent in the pursuit of production values. Black Sunday is a superior terrorist thriller, Prophecy a failed but worthy horror film with environmental overtones, and The Challenge a stylish Japanese romp in the style of The Yakuza. Unfortunately, new directors who grew up with the Frankenheimer work as benchmarks do such material better.
Frankenheimer's late 1980s and early 1990s features?Dead Bang, The Fourth War, and Year of the Gun?did nothing to resuscitate his career, and were quickly forgotten as they made their way to video store oblivion. Only the 1987 theatrical re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, after decades of unavailability, earned Frankenheimer high critical praise. Indeed, the film was atop many critics' lists as among the best to come to movie houses that year. Additionally, the emergence of the high-tech thriller genre, so popular in the 1990s, has been critically traced back to The Train.
In 1994 Frankenheimer returned to his roots in television by directing Against the Wall and The Burning Season, two above-average made-for-TV movies. The former is a solid prison drama that retraces the events surrounding the 1971 Attica prison riots. The latter is even better: an outstanding, politically savvy account of the life of activist Chico Mendes, who battled against the exploitation of those who toil in the Amazon rain forests of Brazil and paid for his valor with his life.?JOHN BAXTER and ROB EDELMAN