John Frankenheimer: The Train

Growing up with action films in the ‘80s and ‘90s — memorizing every John Woo slow-mo gun battle, every world-weary Bruce Willis character quip, every Ah-nold one-liner, and every single frame of something like Lethal Weapon — I didn’t have to look hard to see the influence that Frankenheimer’s approach to the action film in The Train had on the films that I remember so fondly from my formative years. I love what Matt Zoller Seitz says in his remembrance of The Train, calling it: “A huge, roiling, clanking, screeching, rumbling hulk of mayhem that seizes you from frame one and never lets go, the film takes such visible delight in the image of small, desperate men blowing huge things sky-high that it amounts to the very first Joel Silver picture.”

Indeed, The Train does remind one of those early ‘80s/’90s Joel Silver produced actioners, but it’s also something that those movies so often fail at being: it gets you to care about the characters without spending a whole lot of time on character development. There’s something to be said about the way Frankenheimer keeps his film moving at the clip it does but also makes sure to stop long enough so that the viewer is always able to get their bearing and be sure what the characters’ motivations are. This isn't just a fun action movie because stuff gets blowed-up real good; it’s an impressive technical spectacle because, to be sure, but it's also impressive in how it gets you to care about what's happening despite its economy of dialogue and character development. Again, I’ll invoke the great Matt Zoller Seitz here: The Train “balances intellectualized suspense and primitive violence, so that one quality reinforces the other in a never ending cycle of mechanized frenzy and spooky stillness.”

I’ll get back to that “spooky stillness," first, though, the plot: Set in occupied France during the last days of Nazi control, The Train concerns itself with Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster), a French railroad engineer and Resistance fighter who must keep a train filled with valuable art from leaving France for Germany. Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), is the German military officer in charge of the train, and he carries a special affinity for the art collection that he watched over in occupied Paris. His plan is to take art back to his homeland despite orders to the contrary; however, Labiche and his team try to thwart his efforts.
It’s a pretty simple premise, really, and that’s what is so refreshing about it. The motivations for both characters are clear, and we get the classic cat-and-mouse game between Labiche and von Waldheim that would be just as at home in something like (to pick a random ‘90s action movie that I love) Andrew Davis’ Under Siege. And because of The Train’s simplicity, the temptation is there to see the movie as nothing more than impressive setpiece after impressive setpiece.

But Frankenheimer gives us moments that challenges this all-style-no-substance argument like the exchange between our two main characters at the end where von Walheim says, "Those paintings mean as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape!" This statement makes the viewer question Labiche’s motives throughout the film. He may indeed “feel” nothing for the art, so what his motivation then? His sense of duty? Mere revenge? Is it a moral stance (the film does seem to be about the value of life being more important than the value of art). These are questions that most action films don’t ask their audiences to consider, but Frankenheimer does, and he has summed up his reputation as an action director in numerous interviews, calling himself a director of “character-based action movies.”

These deeper character aspects of the film were intended to be more overt during the film’s initial production. Due to the disappointing returns after making Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Burt Lancaster was extremely cognizant of his waning stardom. When he signed on to do The Train, the film’s initial director, Arthur Penn, was much more interested in making it a small-scale character study. Nervous that this would only compound his run of bad box office, Lancaster fired the director and called in his favorite for-hire filmmaker Frankenheimer. I have made mention of this before, but their working relationship always makes me laugh. Perhaps Lancaster brought Frankenheimer on because he knew that Frankenheimer would let him do his thing and instead focus on the technical aspects of the film.

And so it was: Frankenheimer asked the studio to shut down production in order to allow him the appropriate amount of time to rewrite the script, turning The Train from small-scale character study to larger, more ambitious action film. But again, that doesn’t the mean the film is without heart, nor does it mean that Frankenheimer’s only imprint on the film is from the technical side of things. The Train’s character's aren’t merely cutouts designed to stand in front of large-scale setpieces where lots of things explode.

In fact, Frankenheimer has said, “Actually, all of my films have the same theme, and that's a definite choice on my part. I take a character and push him to his physical or emotional limit, to see how he reacts. I think that's the only way you can ever really reach the limits of a human personality, and that's what I'm interested in exploring in my films." So instead of making the film a smaller-scale character study, Frankenheimer heightened the action in order to achieve the same goal that Penn was going for.

A quick note about the actors playing those characters: Both Lancaster and Scofield are great as two stubborn men engaged in a battle of wills (there is a small role for Jeanne Moreau, playing an innkeeper , who assists Labiche, but it feels like another shoehorned female role in an all-male movie a la Ava Gardner’s role in Seven Days in May). Once the action starts, and the motivations for both characters becomes more about defeating the other, The Train never lets up, and neither do the characters. Von Waldheim and Labiche both suffer from a case of severe tunnel vision and are willing to go to great lengths (and in some cases even kill) in order to win their cat-and-mouse game, disregarding the effect it has on those around them. I love the way Scofield utters that final line to Lancaster’s Labiche (stated above); it’s his final attempt to differentiate himself as being better/different than Labiche. Lancaster is equal to the task (I’m warming up to him the more and more I see him in these strong, silent type roles) and a real physical presence on the screen (I also love that he doesn’t even attempt to do a French accent). Lancaster’s performance, in fact, gives credence to the notion that The Train is a masculine action film at its very core.

I want to get back, for a moment, to that phrase that Matt Zoller Seitz used in his essay on the film: “spooky stillness.” Yes, the film is masculine (Burt Lancaster being the avatar for such masculinity as it sure seems like he’s doing his own stunts here, and pay attention to the scene where he is panting like a madman as he crawls up a steep hill and then takes a dangerous fall down the hill in, again, what looks like the actor doing his own stunt), but it also slows down for more reverent moments. And this is due in large part to the way Frankenheimer frames his shots or slows down just enough so that we let the power of a scene wash over us while only hearing the mechanical noises of the train.

The framing in the film is classic Frankenheimer — as we’ve discussed numerous times during this retrospective, he frequently uses wide angle lenses and shoots characters in a basic two shot but employs deep focus — and the most effective of these framing devices is when the elderly train engineer, Papa Boule (Michel Simon), is executed. While Labiche pleads with Colonel von Waldheim, we see in the background the three German soldiers shoot their guns, and then from behind a wall we see Boule’s body slump down. It’s a powerful moment — made more so by the way Frankenheimer frames it and then isn’t in a hurry to rush to the next scene. “Spooky stillness,” indeed.

The Train is one of the most brilliantly kinetic action films I’ve ever seen. And even if one chooses to disregard its obvious (or “low hanging,” an annoying term that so many poo-pooers like to say and then pat themselves on the back) existentialist tone and themes, it still has its technical merits to fall back on — it still can be regarded and studied as an important and masterful piece of filmmaking purely based on its technical merits. Every frame of this black-and-white beauty has something interesting to look at: the characters faces (again, often shot close-up and in a two shot with deep focus), the grimy and gray setting that fills the frame, the way the action drives the narrative (the editing is really something). It’s a film with some serious impact — there’s a real tangible quality about the film — as Frankenheimer gives us shots of the giant train barreling towards the camera (we understand early how massive this piece of machinery is), or showing in high angle long shots of the train barely escaping huge explosions and a potentially disastrous derailing (which, as shots go, must have been hell setting up for). It’s truly a piece of filmmaking that holds up — not only does it hold up, but it puts nearly every modern action film to shame — and showcases what Frankenheimer was best at. The Train, like the best actioners from any era, is a film you feel.

Frankenheimer would return to the paranoid thriller with his next film, Seconds (it would conclude his unofficial “paranoid trilogy”), but would close out the decade with more elaborate, setpiece oriented films like Grand Prix and The Gypsy Moths. But neither of those films are quite as good at balancing the character elements with the technical elements, making The Train one of Frankenheimer’s best, most memorable films of his very prolific and successful run during the ‘60s (we’ll talk more about this with his other films, but the ‘60s were an interesting time for Frankenheimer — perhaps the last decade where he was a real “known” filmmaker before the Scorsese’s and Spielberg’s and Friedkin’s and Coppola’s burst onto the scene kind of leaving him in the dust).

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John Frankenheimer: Seven Days in May

Based on the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Seven Days in May is sometimes referred to as Frankenheimer resting on his laurels by following up his previous film — the masterful The Manchurian Candidate — with yet another paranoid political thriller. That’s a bit unfair, though. Seven Days in May doesn’t have much in common with The Manchurian Candidate. It takes itself too seriously to be a satire, and it seems that Frankenheimer and his screenwriter, Rod Serling, are too busy emphasizing Big Important Speeches than ensuring that there’s any kind of drama or intrigue in the film. The film has a great cast and a fantastic opening sequence, but it ultimately is just too talky. Some of those talky scenes really work thanks to the acting (especially a scene near the end between Burt Lancaster and Frederic March), but ultimately the film feels a lot like Frankenheimer’s previously flawed films like The Birdman of Alcatraz: a film heavy on exposition with some good acting and good setpiece mixed in — but there isn’t much more to it than that.

The premise of Seven Days in May is as follows: Lancaster plays General James M. Scott, who is convinced that President Jordan Lyman (March) is too soft on America's enemies. He feels so deeply about this that he plots a military takeover of the United States. Every time President Lyman gets close to figuring out the scheme, though, he is derailed by political protocol. Eventually, Lyman seeks the aide of the man who first uncovered the plot: Colonel "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas), who is more of a reluctant aide as his ties are very strong to the General.

You see, General Scott has formed a secret base in New Mexico, which serves as headquarters for his plan to overthrow the government. But Colonel Casey begins to think things are odd when he hears of this base — which he is unfamiliar with — as well as references to other bases and units and suspicious protocols that he is unfamiliar with. All of this piques his interest, concerning him to the point where he has no choice but to set aside his loyalty to the General and tell the president about his suspicions that General Scott is planning a military coup d’etat under the guise of a military exercise. 

Seven Days in May is one of the first paranoid thrillers, but it’s not one of the better ones. There are parts where the film really moves — especially in a “The West Wing” kind of a way where there isn’t a whole lot happening on screen, but the acting is so good and the delivery of the dialogue so stellar, that it’s hardly noticeable that we’re essentially just watching people sit/stand around and talk.  The film may feel a bit dated (unlike Manchurian) to some since — as Frankenheimer admitted in the DVD commentary — modern audiences would never be able to accept the premise because such a secret plan in the modern technological age could never go by undetected the way it does in this film. He also stated that audiences would never accept the premise because modern opinions of politicians is lower than it has ever been, so audiences would simply roll their eyes at the President’s speech that ends the film.

But I don’t know that I agree with Frankenheimer. Audiences bought Aaron Sorkin’s idealized White House in “The West Wing,” and as I mentioned above, the film’s emphasis on big speeches about honor and duty and other bits of exposition underlining American Pride is something that would be right up Sorkin’s alley — so the film doesn’t feel too dated.

And whether or not the film may or may not be dated isn’t even the film’s biggest flaw — that would be Rod Serling’s (best known for “The Twilight Zone,” obviously) script and the unconvincing deus ex machina ending. A lot was changed from the source material, actually, most notably the ending where General Scott gets into a car and simply drives home—his name disgraced and career over after his plan has been outed—whereas in the novel Scott drives his car head-on into another car, killing himself. There’s also the matter of the totally unconvincing subplot concerning General Scott’s former mistress, which feels like nothing more than a way to shoehorn Ava Gardner into the film (otherwise it would have been all men in the film). In addition to these flaws, the film is just too talky in parts and is a bit of a slog through the middle portions where it becomes a pretty dull procedural, but that soggy middle is bookended by some great moments that make the film worth seeking out (and make it so much more than a mere Manchurian clone). 

The opening of Seven Days in May — a protest outside of the White House (which was legitimately shot outside of the front gate of the White House without problems thanks to Pierre Salinger’s, President Kennedy’s Press Secretary, insistence that President Kennedy wanted the film made) gone awry — is one of Frankenheimer’s standout setpieces. It’s really the primary reason to check out the film. In my previous essay on The Manchurian Candidate, I brought up the quote from Jonathan Rosenbaum where he said that The Manchurian Candidate could “conceivably be the only commercial American film linked to the French New Wave.” Here, that link is more overt than ever. The immediacy Frankenheimer and his DP Ellsworth Fredericks give the scene and the way they free their camera from the tripod is really quite jarring when you consider the small, talky movie that follows.

Here, Frankenheimer once again relies on his experiences with live television as he moves through the crowd of protesters, making it feel like we’re right there in the fight, and at one point even mounts his camera on the back of police motorcycle. The scene is chaotic (and reminds the viewer of the aesthetic choices used in the fantastic ending to Manchurian), and it is no doubt exciting stuff for the time, but, unfortunately, it is also the most exciting and intriguing thing about the film as every scene that follows fails to live up to this great opening.

Frankenheimer's style of direction is perfect for this film. He uses the same framing techniques and deep focus and wide-angle shots as well as low camera angles that he’s used in all of his previous films. He also worries about the filmmaking and lets his actors act. In an interview with Frank Sinatra on the DVD for The Manchurian Candidate, Sinatra noted how impressed he was with Frankenheimer that he trusted his actors to make the right choices when it came to the script. This is probably because Frankenheimer is a director that is more concerned with the technical aspects of the film than with choices the actors make (why else would he continue to work with Burt Lancaster when the two didn’t really see eye-to-eye?) , and even though the opening scene is a great example of Frankenheimer’s gift for memorable setpieces, Seven Days in May is also a great showcase for its actors, showing that Frankenheimer could facilitate some great performances out of a low key character drama.

Douglas is great as Colonel Casey, displaying an array of conflicting emotions as he juggles loyalty to his country and loyalty to the General. He was also more invested than if this were just a normal job, for he was one of the major driving forces in getting the film made. Initially he was to play General Scott; however, he insisted that Burt Lancaster be in the film and take the much juicer role. This was all very much to the chagrin of Frankenheimer, who, as we’ve discussed in other entries of this retrospect, had some major problems with the star. Ironically, Douglas and Frankenheimer would be the ones that would butt-heads on the set, while Lancaster would continue to collaborate with Frankenheimer on two more films (The Train and The Gypsy Moths).

Lancaster and Frederic March have a fantastic verbal confrontation at the end that, in addition to the opening protest sequence, is the other highlight of the film. I loved the was Lancaster just barrels through the President’s arguments because he knows he’s right, and portrays this character as a man obsessed with his righteousness.It’s not just Douglass, Lancaster, and March that are worth watching, though: Seven Days in May also has a couple of nice supporting performances. Character actors Martin Balsam and Edmond O'Brien are great as President Lyman's advisors.

In wrapping this up, I don’t want it to sound like I’m ragging on Seven Days in May too much. There’s a lot to like here, but the film is a bit of let down coming on the heels of The Manchurian Candidate. Still, the opening is fantastic, and the acting is top notch. Ultimately, it feels a bit like a film Frankenheimer needed to get off of his chest and then move on something less political. However, Burt Lancaster would call upon the filmmaker to rescue yet another one of his films (read: let Lancaster do whatever he wanted), this time from Arthur Penn, as Frankenheimer was brought on for a complete overhaul of The Train, taking it from in-depth character study to action film. The results are a finished product that is certainly the opposite of Seven Days in May.

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John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate

One of the driving forces behind this retrospective was the urge to revisit The Manchurian Candidate. I hadn’t seen the film since high school film class, but Frankenheimer’s film — the last of three released in 1962 — is one that I’ve always had the urge to revisit but just have never gotten around to. It’s a classic thriller containing classic performances (Frank Sinatra was never better), sure, but as Roger Ebert stated in his Great Movies essay: "The Manchurian Candidate" is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a "classic" but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released.” I love the use of the word “frisky” and “alive” because The Manchurian Candidate has an energy that not one of Frankenheimer’s films to this point in the retrospective have had. It not only was, to that point, the best showcase for Frankenheimer’s style, melding brilliantly his experience with live television and aesthetic flourishes (deep focus, handheld, tilts, et al.) that he had been fine-tuning on those previous films, but it was also his most efficient and effective and popular film, and it arguably remains so to this day.

The Manchurian Candidate is exhilarating and darkly funny and emotionally exhausting; it’s also endlessly fascinating — as both paranoid thriller and political satire (the fact that we can’t trust politics at face value is nothing new in the era of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” constantly lampooning our inept government, but it is nevertheless relevant and effective still as satire even if it may not seem as effective as it once was). It’s not just the film’s narrative that is enthralling, though. The mythos surrounding the film’s production and whether or not it presaged the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as the subsequent snags the film’s distribution faced because of what the film may or may not have presaged, is ingrained in popular culture.

For the one or two that may not know what the film is about: The Manchurian Candidate concerns itself with Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who during the Korean War, is credited with saving the lives of two of his men, who have been reported missing, in combat. The platoon's commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), suggests that Raymond be awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. When Marco returns to the states, he suffers from a terrifying, recurring nightmare in which Shaw is hypnotized during a demonstration before military higher ups from different Communist nations. During the demonstration, Shaw is ordered to murder the two missing soldiers. Something about this nightmare keeps gnawing at Marco, and he wants to investigate further but has nothing but his gut to back up his claims of a massive government brainwashing conspiracy. However, Marco learns that another soldier from the same platoon has had the same nightmare, and when Marco get him to identify some of the men in the dream, Army Intelligence agrees to help Marco investigate his claims.

Raymond Shaw's mother, Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury in a movie-stealing performance), is the puppet master behind the political career of her husband, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory). The senator is essentially a McCarthy clone, claiming that a number of communists work within the Department of Defense. Raymond wants nothing to do with his stepfather or his mother, who is parading him around for photo ops and the like. Unbeknownst to Raymond, his mother is a communist agent with a secret plan to supplant her husband as vice president and then have her brainwashed son kill the president so that Senator Iselin can become the new (Communist) president. The catalyst: a playing card. And when Raymond goes into his trances, it is due to the emergence of the Queen of Diamonds during a game of solitaire.

Okay, enough of that. Like I said, The Manchurian Candidate is so ingrained in popular culture that one doesn’t really need a detailed plot synopsis do know what the film is about (the image of the Queen of Diamonds is synonymous with the film’s primary theme). There are so many things that amaze me about the film, and the performances are right near the top of that list. Arguably the best performance Sinatra ever gave (I know many prefer The Man with the Golden Arm), his portrayal as the haunted Marco is great stuff. Notorious for just wanting to do one take (this bit Sinatra in the form of a broken finger during the film’s famous, claustrophobic fight scene with Henry Silva), Sinatra plays Marco’s desperation to figure out the conspiracy brilliantly. Especially in the scene near the end where he plays solitaire with rigged deck in order to get Shaw to tell the truth about the conspiracy.


Lawrence Harvey is quite great, too, although it’s a more subdued performance. The way he acts with his eyes is one of the most memorable things in The Manchurian Candidate. During the aforementioned scene of solitaire, where Marco is playing with the rigged deck, Frankenheimer films Harvey in extreme close up so that we feel his despair (and the paranoia that underlines the scene) — as if we could walk up to the screen and wipe the beads of sweat off of Harvey’s face — and his sad, sad eye say so much. It’s a helluva bit of acting on Harvey’s part, and it all seems so effortless. The way he plays Shaw as the hapless pawn who has serious women issues (established early during the film’s opening scene in a Korean bordello and hammered home by his awkward interactions with his overbearing mother) is just one of the reasons why the film is so unforgettable.

The real show-stealer, though, is Lansbury as Iselin. Already having played a similar character in Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (which was the reason for her being hired as Sinatra insisted on Lucile Ball for the role, but once Frankenheimer showed him Lansbury’s performance as Warren Beatty’s overbearing mother in All Fall Down, Sinatra was all-in), Lansbury plays Shaw’s mother as the proper doting, overbearing — she’s also maniacally evil in her civility. She knows just when to bring moments from Raymond’s tortured past (a forbidden romance with a girl on a summer vacation) to needle him and remind him how much he needs her.

And in one of the film’s most terrifying scenes, she sits with her son and tells him what he’s going to do (“you are to shoot the presidential nominee in the head” – the matter of fact way she says that is chilling), laying out the plan for her husband to take the reins of the country after the presidential nominee has been killed by Raymond (“the speech is short, but it is the most rousing speech that I have ever read”). The whole thing is chilling because of how Lansbury plays it low-key. She could have easily shouted these lines or made them more menacing by implementing hokey acting tricks like some kind of silent movie villain twirling their mustache; however, she very plainly, very confidently lays out the plan for poor, hapless Raymond as if it’s just another conversation.

Apparently the character was toned down considerably from the source material. In the book, Iselin uses the brainwashing techniques to have sex with her son. Wisely thinking that audiences in 1962 wouldn’t go for such a plot point, Frankenheimer had Lansbury play that part of the role very minor (the only hint is the scene near the end where she kisses her son on the lips — I believe this was the compromise). Her portrayal of Iselin as the puppet master vicariously living through the two weak-willed men in her life is one of the legendary performances in all of cinema.

The Manchurian Candidate is also notable for being the film that stands above all others in Frankenheimer’s oeuvre. Only his fifth film, Frankenheimer peppers The Manchurian Candidate with all kinds of signature visuals (a two shot where one character is in focus in the foreground and the other, in focus as well, is in the background is his favorite), and the surreal images and vérité style were not that common to American film at the time. Obviously Frankenheimer is influenced by these styles, but he also implements the documentary he loves to use to evoke that things are really happening at that moment. This is found at the end during the convention and the press conference earlier in the film.

Frankenheimer, like he does in a lot of his film, uses his experience (and techniques he helped innovate) in live television to evoke a sense that the things we’re watching are real/are really happening at that moment. It’s really quite something (the fantastic opening to his follow-up film, Seven Days in May, is even more indebted to this style), especially in those final moments in the convention hall. But for those final moments in the convention hall, Frankenheimer couldn’t figure out how to stage the setpiece where Marco identifies Shaw’s location logically, so he decided to use something out of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent where a lone light in a window would locate where the assassin was hiding out. Frankenheimer even joked that was would be seen as plagiarism during the ‘60s would seen as homage today.

I like what Stephen Bowie on Frankenheimer’s Senses of Cinema page has to say about this style in The Manchurian Candidate:

“Amidst this documentary-styled mise en scène Frankenheimer plants a series of Buñuelian images and draws so little attention to them that the effect is, literally, hallucinatory. The ingenue turns up dressed as a gigantic playing card. One character is shot through a milk carton so that he “bleeds” white. And then there’s the rifle toting assassin with the Medal of Honor pinned directly beneath his priest’s collar. Frankenheimer places each of these moments in an utterly realistic context, never winking at the spectator to acknowledge their out-of-context absurdity. The tone that dominates by a fifth or a sixth viewing may be black comedy.”

The most memorable of these hallucinatory moments is the opening brainwashing sequence. Frankenheimer and his editor, Farris Webster (who also does a great job of cutting the fight scene between Sinatra and Silva), move seamlessly from subjective point of view to objective point of view in one virtuoso 360 degree pan. The scene begins with the objective point of view of Marco’s platoon sitting in a communist seminar to a subjective point of view of the soldiers attending a harmless and quite banal meeting of the Ladies’ Garden Society.

What makes the staging of Marco’s dream sequence so memorable and haunting is that it steers clear of the clichéd dream imagery found in most films (even though I like Spellbound’s Dali-designed dream sequences, they aren’t as unnerving as the unflinching presentation Frankenheimer goes with here). Instead, Frankenheimer slowly metes out the information in a single shot — drawing a nice comparison to the way the characters slowly draw card after card during their games of solitaire throughout the film — so that we go from the safe location and boring garden club seminar (the soldiers even yawn and look totally disengaged with their far-off stares) to a stage where the stuffiness of the garden club is replaced with the starkness of the Communist seminar backed by portraits of Stalin and Mao. It’s really quite something, and does a tremendous job — since it shows up so early in the film — of displacing the viewer in a manner that makes everything that follows all the more intriguing because of how Marco’s dream makes us think everything in this world is askew.


I also love what Frankenheimer and his production designer, Richard Sylbert, do with the blocking. Most shots are just one take (typical Frankenheimer two shot), but they both blanket the screen in political (mainly Lincoln) iconography. There’s a shot where Lansbury sits in the foreground and Harvey enters the scene in the background, but Frankenheimer stages the scene to almost make this a three shot by having a bust of Abraham Lincoln on the desk where Lansbury is sitting, staring at her. He also positions a lamp in a manner that makes the lampshade looks like Lincoln’s iconic hat. There are other scenes, too, for example where Senator Iselin sees his reflection in a portrait of Lincoln or when Frankenheimer has him dress up as Lincoln during the scene where the Iselin’s are at a Halloween party, which also includes the famous shot of Lansbury standing over the Queen of Diamonds costume (just as important an image as Lincoln).

Frankenheimer’s aesthetics often steal the show (and rightly so in many cases), but it shouldn’t ignored that his approach to the film’s narrative (aided by screenwriter George Axelrod) is what also makes it memorable as a dark satire. Like Bowie says in the quote above, it is certainly Frankenheimer’s straight-ahead approach to the material that allows the viewer to see it as a black comedy. The film never preaches its politics, and that’s because that wasn’t Frankenheimer’s intent — he set out to adapt the source material, and that’s it. They weren’t trying to make any grand political statement. And that’s why despite the film’s Cold War setting, The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t feel dated in the least. I also think that detachment from the material — that straight-ahead approach — helps Frankenheimer and Axelrod create the appropriate tone for the film, which Jonathan Rosenbaum called, “conceivably the only American film that deserves to be linked to the French New Wave, full of visual and verbal wit that recalls Orson Welles.” 

I can’t speak for this since I haven’t seen Axelrod’s films post-The Manchurian Candidate, but Stephen Bowie does make a point to mention that the reason the narrative works as satire on repeated viewings is solely attributed to Frankenheimer as Axelrod’s own attempts at directing satire (Lord Love a Duck and The Secret Life of an American Wife) were apparently the types of comedies that constantly wink at the camera and italicize every joke.

As we look at The Manchurian Candidate today, we think of it as being a presage to what occurred a year later with the assassination of President Kennedy and the subsequent assassination of the man accused of killing Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald (who many claimed was nothing more than a “Manchurian candidate”). Unfortunately a lot of the film’s provocative elements now seem common place in the political realm, and so seen through the lens of 2013 politics and the farce that American congress has become, The Manchurian Candidate's satirizing of politicians may possibly feel dated to some. But as a film — as a piece of brilliantly executed paranoid cinema — it’s of the highest order...timeless, I dare say. Frankenheimer was not yet a major filmmaker at this point, but he would cement himself within Hollywood as a major talent known for blending realism with visual metaphor and a kind of “What can I get away with?” mentality. William Friedkin called him “the best, most important, and most innovative filmmaker of his era.” I’ve yet to see enough that makes me think Friedkin is correct, but judging solely on The Manchurian Candidate, I can definitely see where he’s coming from.

Frankenheimer’s next film was another political thriller, Seven Days in May, which was unfairly criticized for being just another version of The Manchurian Candidate. It’s better than those criticisms suggest, but it lacks the darkly wry undercurrent of this film (it’s also really talky) and plays more like a Very Serious Message Movie than something that gets under your skin and continues to work on you. But really, what could have Frankenheimer done to follow up The Manchurian Candidate? It’s a career defining film, and it’s one of the great pieces of cinema from the 1960s.

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John Frankenheimer: The Birdman of Alcatraz

Here’s what I know about The Birdman of Alcatraz: I hadn’t seen it since the summer when I started this retrospective, and I looking around for my notes, I could only scrounge up, “At 143 minutes, the film is way too long.” Insightful, I know. So, seeing how the film is on Amazon Prime at the moment, I decided to re-watch it since I honestly could remember nothing about it, and my notes weren’t offering any help. Well, I can confirm: at 143 minutes, the film is way too long. Like 43 minutes too long. The Birdman of Alcatraz seems to be a popular entry in Franklin’s oeuvre, but I cannot understand why this is. It has little-to-none of the aesthetic flourishes one would associate with Frankenheimer’s later work (as in later that year with the much, much better The Manchurian Candidate), and it boasts one of the most prosaic performances of Burt Lancaster’s (who I am admittedly not a huge fan of) career. The parts of the film that do work are buoyed by some great supporting performances by Karl Malden and Telly Savalas, and an impressive setpiece when the prisoners riots. Other than that, it’s a totally skippable film.

The well-known story is as follows: Robert Stroud (Lancaster) is imprisoned at a young age for a murder he committed in Alaska. He is taken to Leavenworth Prison where he has some run-ins with the  warden (Malden). While in prison, he learns of a situation where his mother was denied the right to see him. Angered by this, Stroud kills a guard and is sentenced to death; however, his mother stages a successful campaign to change the death sentence to life in prison, and the judge agrees so long as the terms include that Stroud spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.

While in solitary, Stroud adopts a pet sparrow, which acts as the catalyst for him collecting different types of birds and cages. When the birds fall ill, Stroud experiments with a cure, and as the film’s story moves forward in time, we see Stroud not as a homicidal killer but as an expert on bird diseases (even publishing a book about the subject). Stroud eventually marries (much to the chagrin of his mother) and begins selling his remedies. However, he is transferred to Alcatraz — which was new at the time — where he is not allowed to keep his birds. And it is there where perhaps Stroud’s legend grew largest.

The rest of the film concerns itself with an again Stroud who is mostly shown as the reluctant rabble-rouser rather than the rebellious and ruthless inmate he supposedly was. Lancaster’s decision to play Stroud’s rebellious attitude as doing what’s best for his fellow inmates in the name of cruel treatment by the prison system is one of the film’s major flaws.

The Birdman of Alcatraz was Lancaster’s pet project. It’s far too serious, subjective, and self-serving to be an effective piece of filmmaking. Lancaster was inspired by Thomas Gaddis’ profile on the convict’s life and rehabilitation. It is said that it touched Lancaster deeply, and this is, I think, the film’s ultimate undoing. Lancaster is too much in the business of idealizing Stroud (again, known to be a prickly customer, even during his “Birdman” phase) that totally removes any intrigue from the film — handcuffing Frankenheimer and the writers so that it is impossible to view Stroud as anything but an angel. A much more interesting film could have been made about a conflicted, complex, and (yes) even dickish Stroud — who, despite being a convicted murder, does some good. But I didn’t feel like that was the person I got to see.

But, the dulling of Stroud’s rough edges was intentional. Lancaster made Stroud into more of an existential character — doing good despite the warden and other’s disapproval. This is a character type not uncommon to Frankenheimer films, but again, this version of Stroud (who Lancaster thought was more of a victim of the system than a cold-blooded killer) is nothing more than an avatar for Lancaster’s message: we need to rethink our prison system. A noble intent, indeed, but one that is too sugary-sweet  in its portrayal of a known psychopath to support a 143 minute prison drama. The film’s best scenes are when Stroud’s intentions are challenged, specifically in the scene between Lancaster and Malden. But moments like that are few and far between.

Frankenheimer does his best to light scenes in a manner that suggests as much space as possible — even though Stroud spent 43 years in solitary confinement, you’d never know by the way the film’s mise-en-scene. But this isn’t one of Frankenheimer’s more stylized efforts. In fact, this is more “A Burt Lancaster film” than a “John Frankenheimer film,” and even though the filmmaker was proud of the final product, he did voice regret over the chance to make the film he could have made out of the subject material. But since Frankenheimer came to the film incredibly late (he was honestly shocked that Lancaster wanted to work with him again after their not-so-great experience working together on The Young Savages), and Lancaster insisted on controlling every aspect of the process, it’s no surprise that outside of the prison riot, we don’t see a lot of what we associate with Frankenheimer.

So as it is, The Birdman of Alcatraz is a too-long drama with some decent supporting performances. But it can’t truly be considered a Frankenheimer film, and even if we were to consider it so, it’s not a very good one. It’s far too impressed with its own sense of moral duty and far, far too languid in its pacing (and not in a good, contemplative way) to elicit any kind of response beyond, “that was a professionally made movie.” No, the real show-stealer of Frankenheimer’s prolific year in film would be his third and final film of 1962, the brilliant (and still exhilarating and relevant) The Manchurian Candidate.

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John Frankenheimer: All Fall Down

John Frankenheimer had an incredible run of films in the 1960s. He would release some of his most visually and thematically ambitious films during this decade. In 1962, Frankenheimer would release three films, two of which were to be his most admired (The Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate). However, it is this third film, All Falls Down, that often gets lost in the shuffle, and it’s easy to see why with its resemblance to films like East of Eden and Splendor in the Grass, All Fall Down doesn’t feel like a John Frankenheimer film. And even though that may seem weird to say considering we’re only three films (and just two of those that I’ve seen) into his filmography, All Fall Down certainly sticks out due to how ordinary the whole thing feels.

All Fall Down’s familiar story concerns itself with 15-year-old Clinton Willart (Brandon De Wilde) who arrives in Florida with some money for his older brother, Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty). Clinton idolizes Berry-Berry, an searches for him so that they can take the money he’s brought and invest in a business together. However, upon his initial search for his brother, Clinton finds that the money his brother asked for wasn’t ever intended for a business deal, it was, instead, intended to bail as bail money. You see, Berry-Berry is in jail for beating up a prostitute, and his name is something you don’t want to utter around town. Clinton, regardless of the rumors surrounding his brother, eventually finds him and pays his bail. Once free, Berry-Berry gives a false promise of visiting for Christmas before sending Clinton back home to Ohio.
These initial moments are pretty straight forward, and it was at this point that I was feeling pretty bummed about having to sit through the rest of this film for another 80 minutes or so. But when Clinton returns home, we begin to find out more about him and his family life, and it is at this point that All Fall Down, albeit familiar territory, becomes a much better and tolerable film with an emphasis on showcasing its extraordinarily good performances from Angela Lansbury and Karl Malden. 

So when Clinton returns home, we meet his prodding, talkative mother Annabel (Lansbury in a performance that Frankenheimer showed Frank Sinatra in order to convince him that she was right for her role as Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate) and Ralph (Malden), his likeable but alcoholic (and emasculated) father. The characters are your typical clichéd mom and dad figures in these types of movies, but Lansbury and Malden elevate them beyond cliché and certainly beyond caricature. Anyway, to the surprise of nobody familiar with how these types of films go, Clinton views his parents’ life as a prison — a monotonous existence when held up to his brother’s life. So instead of engaging in conversation with his parents, Clinton spends most of his days sleeping or hiding out in his room, eavesdropping on conversations and then jotting them down into his notepad; meanwhile, his dad constantly retreats to the basement to drink and to get away from his wife, who paces around the house picking every nit there is to pick.

Just as things can’t seem to get any more boring for Clinton, Echo O’Brien (Eva Marie Saint) comes into his life, shattering the dullness that surrounds Clinton and his family. Echo's beauty and charm beguiles the entire family, especially Clinton. Along with Echo’s arrival, the hopes that Berry-Berry will return for Christmas seems to re-energize the entire family. Berry-Berry eventually does end up returning, and, of course, he falls in love with Echo. Or he at least falls in as much love as a narcissist like him can. And when the inevitable happens (Berry-Berry not reciprocating Echo’s love), and Echo falls in love with Berry-Berry only for him to break her heart once he learns that she is pregnant (for he cannot be tied down), she takes her car and drives it off a cliff. Clinton is aghast at the turn of events and goes from idolizing his brother to plotting to kill him.

Outside from a few aesthetic choices and the focus on a seedy milieu, All Fall Down just doesn’t really feel like a Frankenheimer film. Frankenheimer loved the source material, though, and when asked by producer John Houseman to direct the film, he was really excited to make the film (he was also excited to work with William Inge, who Houseman hired to write the script). However, he had to put it on the backburner in order to finish post-production on The Birdman of Alcatraz. So Houseman went about casting the film without him and All Fall Down just feels like a project that Frankenheimer enjoyed making, but one that got the least amount of his attention between The Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate.

And I think Inge’s script (based on on James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy) is the biggest thing keeping the film from being anything more than a showcase for some great acting. As alluded to earlier, the film feels too much like Inge’s previous Splendor in the Grass — especially in the way the two films deal with, as Stephen Armstrong says, “a love affair between two beautiful neurotics” — and other films of that ilk released around the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. All Fall Down is different in the sense it deals with establishing characters before tragedy punctuates the film whereas Splendor is about characters deal with a tragedy that starts the film.

The few aesthetic touches that Frankenheimer and his DP Lionel Lindon insert into the film — a few canted angles and the Frankenheimer’s favorite, deep focus, pop up here and there — aren’t enough to make the film any easier to get through, as much of All Fall Down plays out in a pretty straight-forward, melodramatic manner, highlighted by some really strong supporting performances. And I’m not trying to suggest that these stories need the kind of aesthetic touches that Frankenheimer and Lindon implement in some of their more showy efforts, but it does make a film like this easier to get through.

As mentioned earlier, Lansbury and Malden are fantastic as the parents. Lansbury’s role is the kind that lends itself to the kind of showy performance that would earn any actress an Academy Award nomination these days. And although Malden doesn’t play “emasculated husband” as well (or over-the-top) as, say, Jim Backus, his role as the father always retreating to the basement for a drink is reason alone to give All Fall Down a try. And Beatty is alright as Berry-Berry. He’s certainly got the right look and the screen presence for the type of character Berry-Berry needs to be. Frankenheimer hated working with him, and what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Houseman mentions what an arrogant ass he was on set. In his memoir, Final Dress, Houseman recalled what it was like working with Beatty:

From the start, our most serious problem was young Mr.Beatty. With his angelic arrogance, his determination to emulate Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean, and his half-baked, overzealous notions of “Method” acting, he succeeded in perplexing and antagonizing not only his fellow actors but our entire crew.

I’m surprised he didn’t mention that Beatty tried to tell Frankenheimer how to direct the film.

Despite the problems on set with Beatty, the filmmakers were pleased with the final product. However, the way the film was received crushed Houseman. MGM’s biggest film that year was Four Horsemanof the Apocalypse, but it was a critical and commercial flop. A panicked MGM scrambled around to find another title to release as their flagship film, but realizing that they didn’t have anything else to release aside from Frankenheimer’s film, they released All Fall Down — what is essentially a small, black-and-white art film — into big moviehouses. And when you think about the kind of mainstream American films audiences were clamoring for in the early ‘60s, the characters and the environment those character inhabit in All Fall Down (or The Young Savages for that matter) were not the kinds of worlds audiences were wanting to escape to. Film’s like King of Kings or West Side Story or Disney films like The Absent-Minded Professor were the types of films topping the box-office charts. So, yeah, audiences were not too enamored with this small picture, and the film bombed.

Despite the commercial failures of All Fall Down, Frankenheimer’s film career was just getting started, and his other two films released in 1962 would go a long way towards cementing his status as a true auteur (although Frankenheimer hated that term) and one of the best (and most underrated) filmmakers of his time.

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John Frankenheimer: The Young Savages

Note: Some of Frankenheimer’s films are pretty hard to come by, one of those being his debut film, The Young Stranger, so I had to start this retrospective with his second film. There’s about a handful of films I couldn’t get a hold of; I will try my best to fill in the blanks as I go.


After a less than thrilling experience shooting his feature film The Young Stranger, John Frankenheimer returned to television (where he got his start) for four years (a practice he would continue throughout his career — proudly showing that he was always a man of television that could bring cinematic ambitions to the small screen) before returning to theatrical filmmaking with his second feature, The Young Savages. Frankenheimer didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for The Young Savages, and it shows in certain scenes, particularly the final 30 minutes of the film where the ambitions of he and his star, Burt Lancaster, pretty much derail the film. But the way he imbues just his second feature with so many stylistic flourishes (a definite sign of things to come for him and his DP Lionel Lindon) keeps one intrigued enough despite the film’s well-intentioned but ultimately flawed narrative.


The story of The Young Savages is really no different than the countless other “juvie” films released around the ‘50s and early ‘60s. In New York’s Spanish Harlem, a 15-year-old blind boy is stabbed to death by three Italian thugs. The street toughs are eventually arrested, and the politically ambitious DA, Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), pushes hard for the death penalty. However, the crime isn’t as cut-and-dry as Cole thinks it is, and his assistant, Hank Bell (Lancaster), who himself was a product of the slums before changing his name from Bellini to Bell while pursuing his career, tries to convince his boss that further investigation in the matter is needed.

Throughout Bell’s investigation we come to find that the onus he has put on himself to uncover the truth is a little more complicated than just hitting the streets and asking questions. Bell’s former fiancée, Mary (Shelley Winters), is the mother of one of the three thugs accused of the murder. In addition, Bell’s wife, Karin (Dina Merrill), takes on the voice of the liberal who is anti-capital punishment. So there are many voices of influence swirling around Bell as he investigates the murder and struggles to uncover the truth and do the right thing. What he ends up finding out is that the boy was actually the head of a Puerto Rican gang (using his guise as a blind kid to hide drugs and weapons since I guess cops would never suspect a blind kid of being mixed up in a gang), and that he was the pimp for his 13-year-old sister.

When Bell uncovers this truth, he is beaten down, stomped to a bloody pulp, by some thugs in the subway. This is the catalyst for Bell to embrace the Bellini within him and see that these kids didn’t murder by choice—it was a product of the environment they’re from. He also begins to feel a strong urge to protect his fellow Italians from the “menacing” Puerto Ricans (who proceed to harass Bell’s wife) even if it means self-sabotage for his political career. Feeling compelled to tank the case in order to stay true to his convictions, Bell argues for the trio of murderers by film’s end.

Surely this kind of material was a bit shocking at the time with its use of a 15-year-old blind kid pimping out his sister and acting as the head of a gang (nothing at all shocking to us now as it would probably pass these days as an episode of “Law and Order”), but I don’t think that the film’s ambitions as a socially conscience message picture mix well with the film’s trappings rooted in exploitation “juvie” pictures, especially since the latter is just so much more interesting than the former. I will say this about the film’s ambitions as a message picture though: The idea of leaving behind who you truly are to get ahead (The whole internal dilemma surrounding Bell/Bellini) and the portrayal of the Italian thugs as a product of a twisted society (in one scene, one of the thug’s tells Bell that his father was a drunk, his mother takes in boarders and then goes out with them, and that he isn’t even sure his sister is his sister) causing them to be the way they are, is a commendable one.

So, kudos go to Frankenheimer for broaching such important sociological issues as race and geography and poverty, but the execution doesn’t match the well-intentioned effort, for what truly stands out in the film — and the only real reason to still see it today — are those aesthetic flourishes that seem rooted in exploitation — the very thing that keeps the film’s narrative from truly resonating. It’s a dilemma, fir sure, but man does Frankenheimer make the film look way more interesting than your run-of-the-mill “juvie” exploitation film. Which shouldn’t come as a shock since the director would meld exploitation with loftier, aesthetic ambitions frequently throughout his career; but here, with The Young Savages, it is interesting to see those ambitions at their gestation.

The opening credits sequence which leads to the stabbing that acts as the catalyst for the film’s story is a doozy. It’s the highlight of the movie with its close-ups of "juvie" iconography (boots, rolled up jeans, et al) found in films of the late '50s, handheld work, stylized shots (I like the shot of the chaos of the opening stabbing reflected in the lens of sunglasses, another bit of "juvie" iconography), on-location shooting, deep focus (a favorite of Frankenheimer’s), and Dutch angles. In other words, if The Young Savages tells us anything, it’s that the opening credits portend everything that Frankenheimer would refine over his career. Credit most definitely also goes to Frankenheimer’s DP, Lionel Lindon, who collaborated with Frankenheimer on some of his most visually memorable films like The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix. The Young Savages is an impressive looking film for something that traditionally comes off as B-grade level.

More about imagery in the opening: I like what Frankenheimer is doing by opening the film with an innocent enough shot of a child buying an ice cream: simplistic and relatable. Who hasn’t, as a child, reveled in the small joy of an ice cream cone on a hot summer day? The image seems simplistic enough, but in reality — as the film’s procedural uncovers more and more about the truth of those opening moments — as we think back on this image we realize that this is the blind boy’s sister, who we’ve also come to realize as the film progresses is being pimped out by her 15-year-old brother. Now the image takes on a whole new meaning, and once again Frankenheimer has taken a simple bit of iconography from countless other films of this ilk, and twisted it just-so to make it much more disturbingly ironic image than first suggested.

The acting is good but not great. I’ve never been the biggest Burt Lancaster fan, but he’s fine and all here; however, as previously stated, the convictions of the actor and the director to make this a message-heavy film really bogs things down in the second half, especially with the stomping scene and the revelation that he’s still “one of them.” Lancaster was somewhat known for thinking that films should really say something (speaking to the widest audience possible) but also be of high quality (speaking to cinephiles). It’s a nice idea and all, but the execution of the narrative, especially the courtroom scene (which takes up about 20 minutes of the film), is all askew and comes off as rather hokey. It's something that, according to Stephen B. Armstrong in his book on Frankenheimer, Pictures About Extremes, states was a problem with some of their collaborations, especially their subsequent picture, The Birdman of Alcatraz. Shelley Winters and Telly Savalas (10 years before he played Theo Kojak) also star and are quite good in their small roles.

Despite the narrative failings of the film, it must be said that early in his career, Frankenheimer was interested in doing something different by making movies about the marginalized as characters to focus on and center the action around. And not for simplistic reasons of exploiting those character types, either. I’m sure we’ll return to this idea throughout this retrospective, for it is one of the traits (along with his visual style) that defines much of Frankenheimer’s work. The following year was a busy one for Frankenheimer, who would have three (!) films released, two of which were, arguably, his most popular and famous films of the ‘60s: The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz. But we’ll first look at the less popular of the three, All Fall Down, starring Warren Beatty and Eva Maire Saint and adapted for the screen by William Inge.

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Blog Announcement: Director Retrospective #4 - The Films of John Frankenheimer

As I wind down Director Retrospective #3, I was thinking of who I wanted to select for the fourth director in this ongoing blog series. I knew I wanted to look back a little in American film, but I couldn't find the right filmmaker that piqued my interest enough to grab all of their movies and dive right in. I was thinking about Sidney Lumet, but that would be a huge undertaking (damn some of those look so interesting, though, so I may still do a truncated retrospective for Lumet down the road), so I thought I would go with someone that shared a lot of similarities with Lumet (and worked under his supervision on the TV movie "You are There"): John Frankenheimer. This is still going to be a big undertaking (not nearly as big as Lumet's nearly 50(!) films), but I'm really looking forward to getting away from writing about horror for now (as much as I love it, it can be a bit of a drag to only watch and write about it) and focusing on Frankenherimer's extremely intriguing oeuvre.

Frankenheimer was one of the pioneers of the live television era, often taking his live shoots outside of the studio, refusing to be confined to the spaces and sets that were normal for a 90 minute live drama. As Frankenheimer ventured into film, his style became even more varied, aping the likes of Orson Welles (Frankenheimer loved deep focus, at least in the films I've seen) and citing Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Carol Reed (among others) as major influences.* There are some major gaps I have in the earliest and latest parts of his career. I don't remember anything about Reindeer Games (his final theatrical film), for example, but have been told that the Director's Cut changes the tone of the film considerably. I also haven't seen Frankenheimer favorites like The Train, Seconds, or The French Connection II. So I look forward to correcting those blindspots.

I've had a tendency to jump back and forth between straight-ahead filmmakers like John Carpenter and Sydney Pollack, and the more visually oriented like Ken Russell and (at times) Oliver Stone. From what I've experienced with Frankenheimer, I think he kind of falls right in the middle. Not getting as crazy as Russell or Stone but not keeping himself out of the way entirely like Pollack did. I'm looking forward to this one.

Now, the problem with choosing a filmmaker like Frankenheimer is that some of his movies are extremely hard to find. Netflix has a pathetic selection to choose from, and Amazon only fairs a little better. There may be some I have to skip unless someone out there can supply me with a copy of the movie. Some of these titles include: The Young Stranger (1957), The Extraordinary Seamen (1969) (I've heard this is quite the trainwreck, and I would love to get my hands on a copy), Impossible Object (1973), 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), The Challenge (1982), and The Fourth War (1990).

Anyway, look for the first entry, The Young Savages, July 29.


*Credit to Stephen Bowie's entry on Frankenheimer found at Senses of Cinema for some of the biographical information used here.

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