8.2 John Frankenheimer

 8.2 John Frankenheimer

John Frankenheimer directs

Along with Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer was the major director to emerge from and be influenced by the aesthetics of live television drama, which flourished briefly in the US before it became commercially and technologically obsolete around 1960. Frankenheimer’s later fame, and his oft-repeated nostalgia for live television, have designated him as the quintessential exponent of the form.

This is a crucial misconception. The aesthetics of live television were defined by their temporal and spatial limitations: all that could be shown was what could be physically created within an hour or half-hour and photographed within the confines of a small space. The work of the young generation of television writers – Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose – emphasised cramped blue-collar settings (“kitchen drama”) because these were the most easily staged for live broadcast.

Whereas Sidney Lumet or Delbert Mann, who rehearsed and blocked their TV productions much as one would for the theatre, seemed perfectly suited to this world of emotional intimacy and physical claustrophobia, Frankenheimer reacted instinctively against it. He sought material and visual strategies that expanded the boundaries of what could be done in live television. Frankenheimer shot one show outside the studio during an unexpected snowfall, and staged the first half-hour of another without a single cut. Atypically, Frankenheimer welcomed videotape when it replaced live telecasts, because tape permitted retakes and limited editing. As the live TV director who took the medium in an explicitly cinematic direction, Frankenheimer was actually the least typical.

Frankenheimer’s first film grew literally out of television; it was an expansion of one of his Climax shows, an autobiographical father-son drama by Robert Dozier (the son of producer William Dozier). Though Frankenheimer too felt overshadowed by a strong father, the film has less in common with his later work than with the wave of movies adapted from live TV dramas in the wake of Marty‘s unexpected Academy Award. Most of these films were fatally diluted by the fusion of movie studio polish with gritty subjects and production design, and The Young Stranger (1957) was no exception.

Frankenheimer, generally at odds with his grizzled RKO crew, felt he had been unable to realise his ideas in The Young Stranger and returned to television for four years before making his second film. The Young Savages (1961) was a social problem picture about juvenile gangs – West Side Story without the songs – and Frankenheimer’s direction suggests a lack of conviction toward the material, especially the preposterous courtroom finale. Frankenheimer concentrated most of his energy on The Young Savages into the opening title sequence, a dazzling few minutes of dutch angles, fisheye lenses, handheld camera and actual Manhattan locations that culminates in a murder shown reflected in the blind victim’s sunglasses.

All of those devices presaged (foreshadowed) the signature visual style that Frankenheimer would refine over his next few films. Frankenheimer tended to cite William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, George Stevens and Carol Reed (a particular favourite) as influences. But his own style was flashier than theirs. His primary mode of long takes and deep-focus lenses owed more to Orson Welles or Max Ophuls. The signature Frankenheimer composition, repeated obsessively, was of one performer in extreme close-up and another far in the background, both in focus. This style of long lens photography required copious lighting and careful choreography, which meant that Frankenheimer’s early output became a cinema of exactitude rather than spontaneity.

Frankenheimer’s filmography between 1961 and 1970 is so bountiful, and so rife with thematic and stylistic interconnections, that one is hard-pressed to sort through it. There is his celebrated paranoia trilogy: The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Seconds. There is a hard action trilogy (The Train, Grand Prix, The Horsemen) of films that centre around physical conflicts between men in a context of combat or sport. There is what might be termed a rural trilogy (All Fall Down, The Gypsy Moths, I Walk the Line), which privilege the atmosphere of their middle American settings over plot or suspense.

 The Manchurian Candidate (1962), sequentially Frankenheimer’s fifth film, is an achievement so elephantine that it tends to dwarf the others in critical assessments of its director’s work. It occupies a place in the popular memory as an eerie prediction of the Kennedy assassination a year later, and an honoured pedestal among cineastes as a cult film rich in murky subtexts and surreal images. The most famous of those is the brainwashing sequence in which Frankenheimer moves seamlessly between an objective perspective (captured soldiers in a communist seminar) and a subjective one (the soldiers attending an innocuous meeting of the Ladies’ Garden Society). This tour de force was a pure distillation of Frankenheimer’s television technique, opening with a self-conscious 360-degree pan that utilised the “wild” sets which allowed TV cameras to move into seemingly impossible positions.

Frankenheimer’s influences also extended to cinema vérité. The climactic political convention, with its harsh lighting and waving placards, recalls the look of Robert Drew’s Primary (1960). The senate hearings, in which James Gregory’s oafish senator decries varying numbers of Red infiltrators a la McCarthy, copies the look of the Army-McCarthy hearings as televised live to American audiences. (Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order [1964], assembled from kinescopes of those broadcasts, is an instructive double bill.)

Seconds (1966), arty and opaque where Grand Prix was vapid and commercial, is a kid’s toy-box of a film, a self-conscious appropriation of European New Wave themes and techniques in the same vein as Arthur Penn’s contemporaneous Mickey One. Collaborating with the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, Frankenheimer adds all manner of New Wave devices to his visual palette: real locations, handheld cameras, extreme close-ups, first-person point of view shots, fisheye lenses, jump cuts, forced perspective sets. Nearly every shot is dazzling.

Seconds extends the assumption of homicidal political conspiracies in The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May to the private sector. In this context, the sensory overload of Frankenheimer’s imagery becomes almost unbearably unsettling and claustrophobic, a kind of cinematic grammar of paranoia. But this strand of the film never quite coheres with the personal story of Tony Wilson (nee Arthur Hamilton). To follow the sinister (and implausible) activities of the shady corporation that offers the “seconds” their new identities, Frankenheimer abandoned writer Lewis John Carlino’s original ending, which reunited Hamilton/Wilson with his discarded family. One suspects that Frankenheimer, still very much displaying on his sets the short fuse that earned him a reputation as television’s enfant terrible, may not have been ready to confront in his art the consequences of male vanity. That would change in the next and most fruitful phase of his career.

Frankenheimer’s reputation rests mainly on a skill for action and an obsession with masculinity, with the two aspects of his work often discussed interchangeably. Frankenheimer himself summed up his métier (occupation) as “character-based action movies”. The terrifically entertaining The Train (1965) best represents this synthesis. The cat-and-mouse conflict between an earthy French resistance fighter (Burt Lancaster) and a culturally sophisticated Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) over a trainload of stolen paintings provides the philosophical underpinnings for the film. Frankenheimer’s thesis – that human life has more value than art – may seem simplistic, but it adds an essential moral component to what would otherwise be just an expensive live-action version of an electric train set.

- Stephen Bowie, Senses of Cinema - Link Here

Come back to two YouTube videos

1) The Manchurian Candidate - Brainwashed 
     YouTube link - Here
     Description: This is the Brainwashed scene from the Movie The Manchurian Candidate featuring
     The Boss Frank Sinatra :-P

   The brainwashing hypnotist Is played,by the late Khigh Dheigh. He later appeared In the original
   "Hawaii Five-O " from 1968-1980 as red Chinese Wo Fat, Steve Mcgarrett's (Jack Lord) arch enemy.

2) The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - I Wanted a Killer Scene
     YouTube link - Here

      The Manchurian Candidate - I Wanted a Killer: The obsessed Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury) gives
      her son (Laurence Harvey) the final instructions on how to assassinate the Presidential nominee.
      

The Manchurian Candidate with Angela Lansbury

My find - 

Angela Lansbury on "The Manchurian Candidate" and on director John Frankenheimer

YouTube clip - Here