Frankenheimer's deceased

Parallax View was saddened to hear over the weekend of the death of film director John Frankenheimer at the age of 72, of a suspected stroke. Over a long, occasionally rambling and often infuriatingly uneven career he made over 40 feature films spanning five decades, including some notable classics such as The Birdman Of Alcatraz, Seven Days In May and Seconds.

Heavy drinking and debilitating periods of depression go some way to explain the more variable quality of the films he made after his mid-sixties peak, problems he attributed himself to the death of his close friend Robert Kennedy, an assassination that ironically revealed how eerily prescient his 1962 cult thriller The Manchurian Candidate was.

Frankenheimer's forte was for action films with an added psychological depth, qualities perhaps best encapsulated by the little-known The Gypsy Moths a 1969 character study of a team of skydivers headed by Burt Lancaster and Gene Hackman, which is one of my personal favourites from his work. In contrast, perhaps the most glaring weakness over his career was the paucity of really strong female roles over such a large spread of movies.

No-one should discount the fact that he made a few dogs in his time, but even in his weaker films there was usually something of interest that helped raise them above straight-to-video hacksmithery. In Dead Bang an embarrassingly out-of-condition cop (played by Don Johnson) runs after a felon only to vomit all over him when he catches hold. In the dull espionage drama The Year Of The Gun the proceedings are briefly enlivened by a sudden, unexpected spot of rough sex between Andrew McCarthy (of all people) and Sharon Stone (getting in practice for her very next film Basic Instinct). Jackhammering their way through several positions this is a scene out of context, clearly gratuitous, and unintentionally hilarious, but remains the only possible reason for anyone wanting to see the film.


Perhaps sadly, Frankenheimer's death comes just as he was regaining respect in the film industry with his solid work on the modest hits Ronin and the under-rated Reindeer Games (blandly renamed as Deception in the UK, and showing on Sky at 10pm tonight) as well as some award-winning television productions. His talents will be sorely missed.

Related links:

When Frankenheimer was good and bad - DVD reviews of Seconds and Prophecy.
The Guardian's obit for John Frankenheimer written by Brian Baxter.