Director John Frankenheimer started out directing live television. He transitioned from TV to cinema during the late '50s. His first 8 films were shot in black-and-white; in 1966, Frankenheimer had begun using color film and most of his subsequent work thereafter dropped in quality (with respect to dramatic content). Here are the hard-hitting, well-written films from Frankenheimer's "early" period:
1957 "The Young Stranger" (Leonard Rosenman)
1961 "The Young Savages" (David Amram)
1962 "All Fall Down" (Alex North)
1962 "Birdman Of Alcatraz" (Elmer Bernstein)
1962 "The Manchurian Candidate" (David Amram)
1964 "Seven Days In May" (Jerry Goldsmith)
1964 "The Train" (Maurice Jarre)
1966 "Seconds" (Jerry Goldsmith)
Only 2 of these titles were issued on soundtrack LPs around the time of the films' release: "The Young Savages" on Columbia records, and "The Train" on United Artists. Maurice Jarre's "The Train" is the best-represented, having its LP content re-issued onto CD by FSM. Fortunately, more of these titles surfaced on CD albums over the past dozen years: "The Manchurian Candidate" on Premiere, "All Fall Down" on FSM, "Birdman Of Alcatraz" on Varese, and "Seconds" on La-La Land. The Rosenman and Goldsmith's "Seven Days In May" remain unreleased.
It seems that North's "All Fall Down" is not a big seller, and Bernstein's "Birdman Of Alcatraz" remains available for years - never reaching the low quantity status - while other Bernstein CDs which were released afterwards, such as "By Love Possessed" & "The Caretakers/The Young Doctors", have since sold out. Goldsmith's "Seconds" fared rather better regarding CD sales, however, if it was not paired with "IQ", would this album have had the same number of buyers?
Why is it that color films from this same time period have higher recognition amongst soundtrack collectors? Members do not clamor over North's "All Fall Down" as they do about "Spartacus". "The Great Escape" sold-out and "The Magnificent Seven" is a Bernstein favorite, yet the "Birdman" does not receive the same amount of appreciation. Jarre has enough detractors as it is, but his "Lawrence Of Arabia" continues to be a milestone, while "The Train" gets a greater proportion of dislike and criticism (whenever it's brought up) than Jarre's work for David Lean. Jarre went on to score 3 more Frankenheimer films in the '60s; "The Train" is my favorite Jarre, though.
"The Train" has unique orchestration - percussion and wind instruments, augmented by accordion - and Jarre's motored ostinatos and themes superbly create aural propulsion to match the titular vehicle. "The Train" has long been one of my favorites, and I consider it to be Jarre's best work after his collaboration with Georges Franju. Nevertheless, I consider "Seconds" to be John Frankenheimer's best film (despite its critical and commercial failure), and Jerry Goldsmith's "Seconds" score to be the best of this lot.
The David Amram albums contain rather too many straight-forward jazz selections for my taste, but the descriptive music is well-written. Some of the composers, like Amram and North, never scored a Frankenheimer film in color, but the others have.
Does anybody consider "The Gypsy Moths", either the film or Bernstein's score, to be better than "Birdman Of Alcatraz"? While the FSM release of Leonard Rosenman's "Prophecy" is very welcome indeed, is there anyone who favors the "Prophecy" film over Frankenheimer's first film "The Young Stranger"? I love Jerry Goldsmith's music for "The Challenge", but can "The Challenge" be counted along with "Seconds" and "Seven Days In May" as great cinema?
What are your thoughts about this? Why are Frankenheimer's early masterpieces not high enough on the soundtrack collectors' radar or wish lists? Despite the classic status of a film such as "The Manchurian Candidate" and the high regard for "Seven Days In May" plus "The Train", will early period Frankenheimer fall further into neglect or obscurity (like "The Young Savages") because they are in black-and-white? Or because some of these scores are not in genuine stereo?
[when you're done reading this, by the way, I hope you'll add FSM's "All Fall Down/The Outrage" into your shopping cart (if you haven't already) - superb music and sound quality!]
A strong list of films and scores indeed with JF's b&w period.
1957 "The Young Stranger" (Leonard Rosenman)
1961 "The Young Savages" (David Amram)
1962 "All Fall Down" (Alex North)
1962 "Birdman Of Alcatraz" (Elmer Bernstein)
1962 "The Manchurian Candidate" (David Amram)
1964 "Seven Days In May" (Jerry Goldsmith)
1964 "The Train" (Maurice Jarre)
1966 "Seconds" (Jerry Goldsmith)
Definitely more hit and miss afterwards, the highlights being:
1966 Grand Prix (Jarre)
1968 The Fixer (Jarre)
1969 The Gypsy Moths (E. Bernstein)
1971 The Horsemen (Delerue)
1975 French Connection II (Don Ellis)
1977 Black Sunday (John Williams)
1982 The Challenge (Goldsmith)
1998 Ronin (Elia Cmiral)
I haven't seen or heard The Extraordinary Seaman, I Walk the Line, Impossible Object, Prophecy, or anything past The Challenge, including JF's TV films, except for Ronin and Reindeer Games. The Iceman Cometh has no score as far as I can recall, and 99 44/100% Dead displayed JF's lack of ha-ha comedy skills and Henry Mancini's score did not stick with me. (Maybe I should re-evaluate that movie now that I've become a keener aficionado of early 1970s crime films.)
My enthusiasm for the music in the b&w films is not terribly strong, except for Seconds, which is one of Goldsmith's very finest scores. But the Seven Days score didn't strike much with me; it seemed like just a lot of military drumming. Jarre's The Train score is very fine.
I'm less taken with the earlier scores. Alex North has never been a big fave of mine and Elmer B's Birdman music I've heard only once. I haven't heard either of the "Young" scores, and I haven't taken the time to listen to Amram's work on its own. There may be treasures there.
The scores for the color films I named above are all attractive. The Challenge disappoints as a movie; it's good pulpy comic-book stuff but it could have been more than that. Goldsmith's score is great however: it's like "Jerry's Greatest Hits" of his 1970s era. This score and the one he wrote for Poltergeist that same year signal the end of that golden age. His music for the remaining 20 years of his life has lots of highlights, of course, but it wasn't quite the same.
Jarre's Grand Prix is fun, even if it sometimes sounds like a Dr. Zhivago hangover; his The Fixer is an interesting change of pace though. There is good action music and "textured soundscaping" (Did I make that term up?) from Ellis and Cmiral. I need to see and hear Delerue's The Horsemen again soon, but I remember liking it. Elmer Bernstein's Gypsy Moths score nicely combines a rural feeling for the Kansas setting and some brassy swagger for the trio of vagabond skydivers.
Williams' Black Sunday always seems to be in the shadow of those other two '77 Williams scores, but the FSM CD gets plenty of spins in my house. It's expert suspense/action music.
I haven't seen or heard The Extraordinary Seaman, I Walk the Line, Impossible Object, Prophecy, or anything past The Challenge, including JF's TV films, except for Ronin and Reindeer Games.
Count yourself lucky you haven't seen The Extraordinary Seaman, I'm a Frankenheimer completist, so I bought an Italian b00t DVD clearly sourced from an ancient TCM cable airing. The film is a cinematic war crime. Everyone involved wisely disowned it. It's a disjointed "comedy" that's as funny as a funeral.
I Walk the Line is a strange little drama about a small town sheriff falling in love with a bootlegger's daughter. It basically feels like an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard played straight. It's mostly notable for the songs by Johnny Cash.
Impossible Object is Frankenheimer's attempt to make a French new wave film - it's his Last Year at Marienbad. It's intriguing, but absolutely impenetrable. It's a series of vignettes about an affair, completely out of chronological order, and in many scenes it's unclear if they're real or fantasy. I had to track down an ancient early 80s clamshell VHS. Again, unless you're determined to see everything he has EVER done, save those two hours of your life.
Prophecy is a shoddily made attempt to cash in on Jaws. It truly feels like it was shot on a budget of $1.95, which ran out 3/4 of the way through, causing many scenes to be left unfilmed. There are plot strands that start and then get abandoned, and everything is basically a mess. Frankenheimer himself apologized for the film, saying his alcoholism got the best of him while making it. It's positively amateurish, way below the usually high standards of his craft.
Of his post-The Challenge theatrical films, 52 Pick-Up is the best until Ronin. It's no masterpiece, just a B-movie, a delightfully sleazy and nasty neo-noir.
As for his TV films, I haven't seen The Rainmaker, The Burning Season, or Andersonville, but I can vouch for the others - Against the Wall, George Wallace, Path to War - as being excellent. You can literally watch his passion for filmmaking be reborn in those TV films, it's astonishing.
I've heard bad things about Extr. Seaman. Is the Jarre score OK though?
I have to admit I have no memory of it, or of the film itself, I've tried to scrub the trauma of viewing it from my brain.
I'm still hoping for a viewing of Impossible Object.
Impossible Object is FASCINATING, even though I couldn't understand ANY of the narrative (what little there is). It's by far Frankenheimer's most personal film. Alan Bates is a charming rogue living in France with his American family. He seems an awful lot like Frankheimer, who similarly lived in France at that time. He cheats on his American wife (played by Frankenheimer's OWN WIFE, Evans Evans) with a lovely and mysterious French woman. The film feels very much like Soderbergh's SCHIZOPOLOIS - marriage therapy on celluloid.
But I Walk the Line and Prophecy are indeed not movies I'm planning to go out of my way to see.
I Walk the Line is interesting, it's actually not bad, and Tuesday Weld is amazing in it. Frankenheimer would work with her again on The Rainmaker, which I have not been able to track down anywhere. It has never had a commercial release, the only copies existing are home recordings off HBO. Every time I find a place online advertising a b00t, the listing gets taken down.
Prophecy is only worth watching if you're drunk, as an unintentional comedy. There's a sequence where the monster (clearly a man in a cheap rubber suit) attacks a family and kills a little boy in a sleeping bag that is truly one of the funniest things I have ever seen committed to film. Basically, imagine if Ed Wood had remade Jaws.
I want to give 52 Pick-Up a try. As a Scheider fan, I'm surprised I haven't seen it already!
It's skillfully made, but be prepared, it's truly nasty and fairly misogynistic. I've never read any Ellmore Leonard, but my understanding is that it's the most faithful adaptation of any of his novels, most others tone down the violence apparently. Scheider is great in it, as is Ann-Margret. It was infamous in the 80s for being the movie kids would sneak glimpses of on late-night cable because it has a LOT of nudity, including a party/orgy sequence that stars actual name porn stars. It truly pushes the very boundaries of the R rating.
I remember years ago seeing a clip from Prophecy in which a sleeping bag goes flipping through the air, smashes into a tree, and feathers go flying everywhere. Maybe this was meant to be the Airplane! of horror films after all? LOL
I'm not surprised to read your description of 52 Pick-Up with its nude orgies. Frankenheimer pioneered the depiction of nude bacchanals in American film back in '66 with Seconds!
You've got me more intrigued now to investigate JF's latter career TV work.
I remember years ago seeing a clip from Prophecy in which a sleeping bag goes flipping through the air, smashes into a tree, and feathers go flying everywhere. Maybe this was meant to be the Airplane! of horror films after all? LOL
I present to you... cinematic greatness:
I'm not surprised to read your description of 52 Pick-Up with its nude orgies. Frankenheimer pioneered the depiction of nude bacchanals in American film back in '66 with Seconds!
The version of Seconds currently in circulation is not the original theatrical cut, it's a significantly revised cut Frankenheimer created for laserdisc in the 90s. The lengthy nude sequence was not included in the original version, or at least the nudity was not.
You've got me more intrigued now to investigate JF's latter career TV work.
You won't be disappointed. Path to War, his final film, is by far the best, but they're all great. You can tell he found a renewed passion for film after doing over a decade of theatrical movies on autopilot.
The less said about The Island of Dr. Moreau, the better.
The fact that when I went to YouTube looking for the sleeping bag attack I found like HALF A DOZEN uploads of it, in various forms, cracks me up.
My favorite bit isn't even the outrageously funny shot of the sleeping bag exploding, it's the beat before that, where the little boy is HOPPING away from the monster. Who in their right mind on set thought that would read as anything other than hysterically funny?
Prophecy is not without its charms, but it needs to be enjoyed on a Showgirls kind of level as an inexplicable catastrophe from a bunch of otherwise very talented people.
Black Sunday is my favorite film of his, it's a gripping thriller that also manages to be far and away the most nuanced and intelligent popular film ever made about international terrorism.
It doesn't hurt that it contains one of my top 5 favorite scores of all time as well, by John Williams.
Manchurian Candidate is a close second for me, it's a flawless masterpiece, on every level. I simply enjoy Black Sunday 1mm more. That said, Manchurian Candidate contains my favorite monologue scene in film history:
World-class writing, acting, and staging for the camera.
James, do you know which of his films Frankenheimer was able to record a commentary for before his death? I've heard his commentary tracks for Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Seconds, French Connection II, and Ronin. I'm aware that he did tracks for The Gypsy Moths and (I think) Seven Days in May. Were there any others? He's one of the best director commentators I've yet heard.
James, do you know which of his films Frankenheimer was able to record a commentary for before his death? I've heard his commentary tracks for Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Seconds, French Connection II, and Ronin. I'm aware that he did tracks for The Gypsy Moths and (I think) Seven Days in May. Were there any others? He's one of the best director commentators I've yet heard.
I agree, his commentaries were AMAZING, it's a shame he passed away before he could record more. the ones he did record are:
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE SEVEN DAYS IN MAY THE TRAIN SECONDS THE GYPSY MOTHS FRENCH CONNECTION II THE HOLCROFT COVENANT ANDERSONVILLE RONIN REINDEER GAMES REINDEER GAMES: DIRECTOR'S CUT (yes, he recorded a brand new commentary for this)
The only ones not on BD are Andersonvile and Reindeer Games theatrical cut
As for his other films, there are two amazing books of interviews with him, where he discusses all his films in depth. They're virtually identical in format, writers who followed Frankenheimer over the years and interviewed him frequently, with chapters on each film, but the content is almost completely different, and I recommend that any fan of his pick them both up.
Thank you for all the JF information, James. And, yes, I wish he had been able to record more commentaries.
I learned two of the most interesting and useful hints for directing from his commentaries:
- He said that for any exterior scenes he would always have the location hosed down before filming. Being wet would make it photograph better, of course, with richer colors, but more importantly, if it rained later in the day, the footage would still match and they wouldn't need to stop filming - He also described how whenever he looked for locations, especially interiors like rooms, he would look for a space that was twice as big as he actually needed, that way he could have the crew and all the equipment in the empty half of the room. He had learned this the hard way on an early film by choosing a room that was exactly the size needed on film, and having nowhere to put the camera.
