A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film

Jonah

262 Jonah BILL KROHN One characteristic of directors trained in television is their extraordinary stamina. John Frankenheimer pays tribute to that underrated virtue in The French Connection II (1975), where Gene Hackman’s pursuit on foot of Fernando Rey making his getaway by boat is far more engaging than William Friedkin’s famed French Connection car chase (1971). Out of shape after his detox, dodging through Marseille crowds with his eye on the boat that he isn’t even sure contains his quarry, almost too exhausted by the end to clamber over a low barrier when he finally sees an opening onto the water, Hackman squeezes off two shots as Rey emerges onto the deck, sure that his Droopy-like adversary has been left far behind. Bang bang!—Rey, startled, tumbles back and the film is over. Frankenheimer ’s career was like that chase. Continuities We know how it began: a director he was seconding on a live episode of Danger saw himself on camera, cried “Save me!” and threw up on his assistant director , who proceeded to finish the show. Promoted to director, the assistant soon found himself doing prestige dramas and, when the Young Turks of the cathode tube hit the pavement in the late 1950s, arty movies. That Danger episode was about an escape from a German prison camp, which set one of the topical templates for the subsequent career. Frankenheimer’s next big break came when he was hired to replace the director of Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and saved the film. Prison was now locked in as a Frankenheimer “obsession,” although like many directorial obsessions, it was acquired by accident. The offscreen substitution must have also lodged in his subconscious, because it’s the basis for the commie plot in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a film he selected to make when he was riding high: the red-baiting Democratic candidate for vice president is supposed to replace his running mate at the top JONAH 263 of the ticket when the man is slain by a hypnotized drone during his victory speech to the TV cameras. Senator Jordan’s observation of the red-baiter, that “if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more harm to this country than he’s doing now,” is a classic liberal line, 1 and Frankenheimer was nothing if not a classic 1960s liberal (Jacobson and González 45). When Frank Sinatra called his friend President John F. Kennedy on behalf of worried UA executives to get his okay before proceeding with the film, JFK, a rabid cold warrior who kept trying to have Castro assassinated (Hersh 268–93), said it was one of his favorite books, along with the James Bond series. Then JFK was assassinated, and after Frankenheimer devoted himself body and soul to Robert Kennedy’s 1968 primary campaign for president, which at one time was supposed to end with a victory dinner at Frankenheimer’s home in Malibu, Bobby was assassinated, too, by a real-life hypnotic drone, with a second gunman administering the killing shot (see Melanson; O’Sullivan). Kennedy had asked Frankenheimer to stand with him on the platform when he made his victory speech, but he demurred, thinking it would look bad for the candidate to have a movie director next to him. “The man standing next to him was shot, too,” he told Charles Champlin. “If I’d been with him, that would’ve been me.” But in a way, it was as if it had been. When Wallace (Gary Sinise) in George Wallace (Turner Network Television, 1997) is shot while campaigning for president, the scene recalls images of Robert Kennedy after he was assassinated in Los Angeles. Digital frame enlargement. 264 BILL KROHN  “My world was over as I knew it,” Frankenheimer later said of Bobby’s assassination (Thurber and King). He fell into depression and drink, and his career went south, with occasional oases of commercial success. His films also changed, keeping abreast of the times. The early Frankenheimers are made up of Orson Welles shots reconfigured into contrast-y black-and-white images that would stand out on the small screen and certainly stand out on a big one. One habit he never kicked was deep-focus shots of big heads looming in the foreground while homunculi in sharp focus listen in the background. But even before the second Kennedy assassination his...