FRANKENHEIMER, John

(1930-)

   US film director. A graduate of the 1950s school of live tv drama, JF first attracted attention as a film-maker with melodramas centred on youth and social issues: The Young Stranger (1956), The Young Savages (1961), All Fall Down (1961) and The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).However, in his direction of The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and SECONDS (1966), all based on successful novels, JF revealed a distinctive fantastic vision, rooted in the realities of the USA of the 1950s and 1960s, which would be a great influence on the 1970srun of post-Watergate conspiracy movies, like Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) and William Richert's Winter Kills (1979). Seven Daysin May, in which the USA is threatened by a military coup, and The Manchurian Candidate are political fantasies focusing on theprecariousness of the presidency, while Seconds, one of the scariest films of the 1960s, is a nightmare about rejuvenation. These exercises in unease are confidently shot in black-and-white with the Expressionist imagination of a top-drawer TWILIGHT ZONE episode, and feature a brilliant oddball casting of his stars. JF's films at this stage are a vision of a grey-suited corporate USA gone wrong, with recurrent themes of brainwashing, surveillance, assassination and Kafkaesque bureaucracies, many of which returned in his still-underrated comic-book gangster fantasy 99 \& 44/100% Dead (1974; vt Call Harry Crown) and the large-scaleterrorist thriller Black Sunday (1977). He had a commercial success with The French Connection II (1975), but his return to sf with PROPHECY(1979), a hokey, expensive MONSTER MOVIE, was a major disappointment, and his more recent films have tended to be bland adaptations of best-selling thrillers.

   KN

   See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.