Born on February 19, 1930, in New York City, and passing away on July 6, 2002, in Los Angeles, John Frankenheimer stands as a pivotal figure in American cinema. Often mentioned alongside Sidney Lumet, Frankenheimer emerged as a leading director from the vibrant, albeit short-lived, era of live television drama in the United States, which faded from prominence around 1960 due to commercial and technological shifts. His subsequent acclaim and frequent expressions of nostalgia for live television have cemented his image as the quintessential product of that medium.
However, this perception, while understandable, can be misleading. The essence of live television aesthetics was dictated by temporal and spatial constraints. Productions were confined to what could be created and filmed within the tight timeframe of an hour or half-hour, all within the limited space of a studio. The groundbreaking work of young television writers like Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, and Reginald Rose often highlighted intimate, blue-collar settings – “kitchen sink dramas” – primarily because these were the most practical to stage and broadcast live.
Directors such as Sidney Lumet and Delbert Mann, who approached television productions with a theatrical rehearsal and blocking style, seemed naturally suited to this realm of emotional closeness and physical confinement. In contrast, John Frankenheimer instinctively pushed against these limitations. He actively sought out material and visual approaches that could expand the boundaries of live television. Notably, he once filmed a show outdoors amidst an unexpected snowfall and orchestrated the first half-hour of another program without a single edit. Unusually for the time, Frankenheimer welcomed the advent of videotape replacing live broadcasts, recognizing its potential for retakes and basic editing. As a live television director who steered the medium towards a distinctly cinematic direction, John Frankenheimer was, in many ways, an anomaly, the least typical of his cohort.
Frankenheimer’s transition to film was a natural progression from his television work. His debut feature, The Young Stranger (1957), directly evolved from a Climax television episode he directed, an autobiographical father-son narrative by Robert Dozier. While John Frankenheimer himself reportedly felt overshadowed by his own father, The Young Stranger shares more thematic ground with the cycle of films adapted from live television plays that followed the unexpected success of Marty. Many of these adaptations suffered from a dilution of their gritty realism when combined with Hollywood studio gloss and production values, and The Young Stranger was not immune to this issue.
Feeling constrained by his experience on The Young Stranger, where he often clashed with the seasoned RKO crew, John Frankenheimer returned to television for four years before embarking on his second film project. The Young Savages (1961) marked his return to the big screen, tackling the social problem genre with a story about juvenile gangs, often described as West Side Story without the musical numbers. However, Frankenheimer’s direction in this film appears somewhat uncommitted to the material, particularly in the improbable courtroom climax. His directorial energy in The Young Savages is most evident in the opening title sequence. This dazzling montage, lasting just a few minutes, showcases Dutch angles, fisheye lenses, handheld camera work, and authentic Manhattan locations, culminating in a murder depicted in the reflection of the blind victim’s sunglasses.
These stylistic devices foreshadowed the signature visual language that John Frankenheimer would refine in his subsequent, more celebrated films. While he often cited classic Hollywood directors like William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, George Stevens, and Carol Reed as influences, his personal style was undeniably more flamboyant. His preference for long takes and deep-focus lenses is more reminiscent of Orson Welles or Max Ophuls. A recurring compositional motif in John Frankenheimer‘s work involves placing one actor in extreme close-up while another is positioned far in the background, yet both remain sharply in focus. This long-lens photographic style demanded extensive lighting and meticulous choreography, resulting in an early filmography characterized by precision rather than spontaneity.
The period between 1961 and 1970 represents a remarkably fertile and interconnected phase in John Frankenheimer’s film career. His output during this decade is so rich in thematic and stylistic overlaps that categorizing it becomes a complex task. This era gave rise to his acclaimed “paranoia trilogy”: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), and Seconds (1966). Concurrently, he crafted a “hard action trilogy” encompassing The Train (1965), Grand Prix (1966), and The Horsemen (1971), all centering on physical conflicts between men within contexts of combat or sport. Additionally, what could be termed a “rural trilogy” emerged with All Fall Down (1962), The Gypsy Moths (1969), and I Walk the Line (1970), films that prioritize the atmosphere of their middle American settings over intricate plots or suspense.
The Manchurian Candidate
A still from John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, showcasing the film’s suspenseful and politically charged atmosphere.
The Manchurian Candidate, released in 1962, was John Frankenheimer‘s fifth film and stands as a monumental achievement, often overshadowing his other works in critical discussions. It holds a unique place in popular culture, resonating as an eerie premonition of the Kennedy assassination the following year, and is revered by cinephiles as a cult classic brimming with shadowy undertones and surreal imagery. The most iconic sequence is undoubtedly the brainwashing scene, where Frankenheimer seamlessly transitions between an objective viewpoint – captured soldiers attending a communist indoctrination seminar – and a subjective one, depicting the same scene as a seemingly innocuous meeting of a Ladies’ Garden Society. This tour de force distillation of John Frankenheimer‘s television expertise begins with a self-aware 360-degree pan, exploiting the “wild” sets that allowed television cameras unprecedented mobility.
John Frankenheimer‘s influences also extended to the burgeoning cinema vérité movement. The climactic political convention scene in The Manchurian Candidate, with its stark lighting and waving placards, echoes the visual style of Robert Drew’s documentary Primary (1960). The senate hearing sequences, featuring James Gregory’s buffoonish senator railing against varying numbers of communist infiltrators in a McCarthy-esque manner, mirror the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. (Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order [1964], compiled from kinescopes of those broadcasts, serves as a compelling companion piece).
Within this documentary-inspired mise en scène, John Frankenheimer subtly incorporates a series of Buñuelian images, so understatedly presented that their impact is genuinely hallucinatory. The ingenue character appears dressed as a giant playing card. One character is shot through a milk carton, causing him to “bleed” white. And then there is the rifle-wielding assassin with the Medal of Honor conspicuously pinned beneath his priest’s collar. Frankenheimer situates these moments within an utterly realistic context, never signaling to the audience the inherent absurdity of these out-of-place elements. On repeated viewings, the dominant tone of The Manchurian Candidate reveals itself to be black comedy. Critics who dismiss these striking “set pieces” as originating solely from Richard Condon’s novel or George Axelrod’s screenplay adaptation miss a crucial point: the biting satire and frenetic eccentricity characteristic of both writers are brought to life precisely because John Frankenheimer films them with unwavering seriousness. One only needs to watch the self-satisfied farces later directed by Axelrod himself, where every joke is practically telegraphed with a drumroll, to fully appreciate Frankenheimer’s distinctive contribution.
With Seven Days in May (1964), John Frankenheimer risked repeating the formula of The Manchurian Candidate: another political conspiracy, another battle of wills between men in positions of power. However, in contrast to Manchurian’s blend of surrealism and vérité, Frankenheimer intentionally avoids any stylistic flourishes in Seven Days in May. Remarkably, this supposed thriller is primarily driven by dialogue. Seven Days in May unfolds as a series of conversations, often staged against backdrops that subtly amplify the sense of underlying threat: bunker-like Pentagon conference rooms, vast White House chambers that dwarf the characters, and a strangely desolate desert cafe.
Seven Days in May, while occasionally succumbing to didactic, Rod Serling-esque speeches towards its conclusion, is not quite a masterpiece. Yet, within it, John Frankenheimer casually refines the template for the paranoid thriller. He establishes a pattern of prolonged tension buildup followed by only fleeting moments of release. A fatal plane crash, a kidnapping in the desert, and another abduction at an airport all occur off-screen. The sole chase sequence is abruptly cut short before its resolution is evident. The film rigorously adheres to the perspectives of the whistleblower Jiggs Casey and his allies, so that Burt Lancaster’s menacing General Scott remains an enigma throughout. By deliberately withholding the audience’s desire for complete understanding of the conspiracy’s scope, John Frankenheimer places the onus on the viewer’s imagination, much like Val Lewton’s approach of only hinting at the supernatural in his RKO horror films. As in real life, the more we are assured that nothing is amiss, the more suspicion we harbor.
The seemingly insignificant clues that John Frankenheimer presents to tantalize the audience – a rumor about a betting pool among generals, a crumpled piece of paper, a minor deception from Casey’s superior – only gain significance for Casey when he witnesses a televised speech by Scott that provides a new context for everything he has learned. Television screens, subtly present throughout both The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, are a recognizable motif in John Frankenheimer’s filmography. At a time when Hollywood studios often deliberately ignored television, viewing it as a competitor, Frankenheimer was among the first filmmakers to acknowledge television’s pervasive role in modern society – both as an invasion of privacy and as a tool for manipulation by those in power. In The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury mouths the words of a speech being simultaneously delivered on television by her senator husband; the audience alone is privy to the true source of power. The movements of Pentagon personnel in Seven Days in May are constantly monitored via closed-circuit cameras. John Frankenheimer, who even makes a cameo appearance in Black Sunday (1977) as a sports broadcast director, might have fostered the impression that his ubiquitous television screens were a nostalgic inside joke. In reality, they represent a pointed critique of media dishonesty, a theme akin to Network but subtly woven throughout numerous films where television intrudes upon the periphery of everyday life. Frankenheimer’s video screens almost invariably highlight a disconnect between the truth presented to the audience and the fabricated reality presented to the characters within the film, a theme whose prescience is undeniable.
In his DVD commentaries, John Frankenheimer would sometimes become absorbed in technical details, meticulously identifying the specific lens used for each shot. Late in his life, he still fondly recalled the names of his favorite live television cameramen. Grand Prix (1966), his expansive three-hour exploration of a Formula One racing season, seemed to stem from this technical fascination.
Grand Prix boasts an impressive array of technical achievements. The use of multiple images within the film’s Super Panavision frame sparked a brief trend for split-screen imagery in the late 1960s, and his innovative use of car-mounted cameras became a standard technique in television coverage of motorsports. John Frankenheimer himself was an amateur race car driver, and his visual and auditory strategies effectively captured the drivers’ sensations of high-speed motion and sensory deprivation with unprecedented realism in sports filmmaking. The racing sequences where music or voiceover replace the roar of engines and the crowd have a strange, almost poetic beauty. In a sequence as delightfully tangential as the elephant parade in Hatari!, Maurice Jarre’s whimsical score orchestrates an abstract montage of cars, track, and spectators. Having strategically diffused any suspense by hinting at Yves Montand’s character’s eventual victory, John Frankenheimer examines auto racing primarily as an aesthetic spectacle.
However, Grand Prix juxtaposes formal innovation with remarkably conventional content. Loosely conceived as a variation on Grand Hotel (1932), Grand Prix is populated with stereotypical characters uttering tedious romantic clichés and delivering aphoristic dialogue attempting to explain the allure of auto racing. The apparent indifference of the all-star cast towards the material is mirrored by John Frankenheimer’s seeming disinterest in them, as if the director was determined not to let the Ferraris be overshadowed by any ostentatious acting.
Seconds
A scene from John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’, highlighting the film’s exploration of identity and paranoia through striking visuals.
Seconds (1966), in stark contrast to the commercial appeal of Grand Prix, is an intentionally artistic and opaque film, a self-conscious embrace of European New Wave themes and techniques, similar to Arthur Penn’s contemporary film Mickey One. Collaborating with the renowned cinematographer James Wong Howe, John Frankenheimer incorporated a wide range of New Wave cinematic tools into his visual vocabulary: real locations, handheld cameras, extreme close-ups, first-person point-of-view shots, fisheye lenses, jump cuts, and forced perspective sets. Almost every shot is visually arresting.
Yet, Seconds’ narrative, concerning a disillusioned middle-aged banker transformed into a bohemian Rock Hudson, clumsily attempts to literalize the vague sense of alienation permeating Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, or the dreamlike, symbolic imagery of political and body horror found in Bergman’s The Silence (two films that appear to have been significant influences). Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another, made in Japan around the same period as Seconds, tells a thematically similar story of a man granted a new physical form through science. Teshigahara brilliantly explores the metaphysical implications of this fantastical loss of identity, while Seconds falters, remaining just on the verge of genuine metaphor.
Seconds expands the themes of homicidal political conspiracies present in The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May into the realm of the private sector. In this context, the sensory overload of John Frankenheimer’s visual style becomes almost unbearably unsettling and claustrophobic, forming a kind of cinematic language of paranoia. However, this aspect of the film never fully integrates with the personal narrative of Tony Wilson (formerly Arthur Hamilton). To emphasize the sinister (and somewhat implausible) operations of the shadowy corporation providing “seconds” with new identities, Frankenheimer abandoned writer Lewis John Carlino’s original ending, which would have reunited Hamilton/Wilson with his estranged family. One suspects that John Frankenheimer, still exhibiting on set the volatile temperament that earned him the reputation of television’s enfant terrible, may not have been ready to confront in his art the consequences of male vanity. This would change in the subsequent, and arguably most fruitful, phase of his career.
John Frankenheimer‘s reputation largely rests on his mastery of action and his exploration of masculinity, often discussed as intertwined aspects of his work. Frankenheimer himself concisely described his métier as “character-based action movies.” The Train (1965), a terrifically engaging film, best exemplifies this synthesis. The cat-and-mouse game between a down-to-earth French resistance fighter (Burt Lancaster) and a cultured Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) over a trainload of stolen paintings provides the philosophical underpinning of the film. John Frankenheimer’s central thesis – that human life is more valuable than art – may seem simplistic, but it injects a vital moral dimension into what could otherwise be perceived as merely an elaborate live-action version of a model train set.
Prior to The Gypsy Moths, the majority of John Frankenheimer’s films had primarily focused on male characters. The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and The Train were all fundamentally masculine contests of will. Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Grand Prix, and The Fixer (1968) were set in worlds dominated by male endeavors, with female characters often relegated to secondary roles. Yet, John Frankenheimer’s work lacks the overt expressions of anguished masculinity, courage, bravado, or the repellent misogynistic undertones sometimes found in Sam Peckinpah’s films, and certainly not the belligerent endorsement of aggression and bullying that marred some of John Ford’s films. It often seemed that Frankenheimer was simply drawn to settings that evoked the familiar, comfortable atmosphere of his live television apprenticeship: pressurized, fast-paced, all-male environments of ego and power dynamics.
This focus began to shift with John Frankenheimer’s back-to-back masterpieces of 1969–70, The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line. These often-overlooked films introduced new stylistic and thematic dimensions into Frankenheimer’s body of work, marking a departure from the overt formalism of Seconds and Grand Prix. In these films, he began to delve beneath the stoic, “iron man” exteriors of his archetypal male action heroes, and to introduce female characters with genuine substance and depth for the first time.
These films also saw John Frankenheimer immerse his signature style in the naturalism of authentic locations far removed from Hollywood. The Gypsy Moths chronicles a languid, uneventful holiday weekend from the perspective of three barnstorming parachutists who arrive in a small Kansas town to perform for a holiday crowd. I Walk the Line is a Southern-fried variation on The Blue Angel, where a Tennessee lawman jeopardizes his life and principles in pursuit of a seductive moonshiner’s daughter. Both films built upon ideas explored in All Fall Down (1962), an earlier foray into William Inge territory, earnest but somewhat studio-bound and heavily reliant on Method acting, which is often mistakenly considered an anomaly in John Frankenheimer’s filmography. Frankenheimer was reportedly dissatisfied with the contrast between All Fall Down’s vibrant Florida exteriors and its studio-shot interiors, but in The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line, he fully realized his interest in the quietude of summery small towns and the suppressed passions of taciturn middle Americans who – unlike the garrulous politicians of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May – required John Frankenheimer’s camera to become the primary means of expressing their inner lives.
John Frankenheimer’s dedication to location shooting began with The Train, but in The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line, the settings become more than just a pursuit of verisimilitude. The characters’ homes and environments provide crucial insights that they themselves cannot articulate: the serene yet stifling middle-class home of the Brandons in The Gypsy Moths, the dilapidated shack of the moonshiner family in I Walk the Line, accessible only via a precarious bridge. Extensive helicopter shots and lengthy scenic montages during the opening credits of both films establish the specific context in which these characters exist.
John Frankenheimer drew inspiration from the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, and the sharp lines and forceful camerawork of his earlier films gave way to tableaux of unadorned Americana. The lighting is often beautiful, but the settings are deliberately plain, even somewhat shabby – like the women’s club hall with folding chairs and the lackluster strip joint in The Gypsy Moths. I Walk the Line reverses the sun-drenched visual palette of The Gypsy Moths, with its blue-sky parachute jumps against golden wheatfields. For I Walk the Line, a more pessimistic work, Frankenheimer deliberately avoided warm colors, scheduling all outdoor scenes for overcast days, resulting in a film bathed in muted blues and grays. In I Walk the Line, John Frankenheimer’s camera pauses to capture portraits of the Tennessee town’s actual residents, a silent chorus of non-Hollywood faces. The Gypsy Moths’ title is visually explained in a silent long shot where Rettig (Burt Lancaster), the self-destructive parachutist, pauses to observe moths burning themselves on a lamp on the Brandons’ front porch. The image is poignant enough to transcend the obviousness of its symbolism.
I Walk the Line
Gregory Peck in John Frankenheimer’s ‘I Walk the Line’, a film that subverts his iconic persona and explores themes of obsession and midlife crisis.
The most sympathetic characters in both The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line are women, such as the loyal, bewildered wife (Estelle Parsons) in I Walk the Line who struggles to maintain both her marriage and her dignity. In The Gypsy Moths, Deborah Kerr’s repressed college-town housewife is sexually adventurous but ultimately admits that, when presented with an escape from her monotonous marriage, “the thought terrified me.” Sheree North’s easygoing topless dancer has a casual one-night stand with Gene Hackman’s gruff character, then matter-of-factly reveals (to the audience) that she has no regrets, even though Lancaster’s Rettig was the man she truly desired.
The male protagonists of these films are initially presented as familiar figures of admiration: an adventurous, iconoclastic daredevil in The Gypsy Moths and a quiet, principled lawman in I Walk the Line. However, John Frankenheimer probes beneath the surface of these idealized images. Burt Lancaster’s Mike Rettig is revealed to be a terminal thrill-seeker, a man deliberately disconnected from human connection and only truly alive when defying death. While this character archetype could easily become a cliché, Lancaster’s (and Frankenheimer’s) restraint maintains his emotions as enigmatic and internal. Like other characters in the film, the audience only glimpses fleeting hints of the inner turmoil of this man. Here, in The Gypsy Moths, rather than in Seconds, is where John Frankenheimer truly connects with Antonioni’s pervasive sense of unease.
If The Gypsy Moths examines the courage or cowardice individuals display at critical junctures, the more somber I Walk the Line suggests that obsession ultimately overrides choice. It is a bleak depiction of midlife crisis, redeemed from potential absurdity by its complete lack of condescension. John Frankenheimer had previously satirized the cliché of middle-aged dissatisfaction in Seconds (think of Tony Wilson meticulously constructing the persona of a Malibu Colony artist, stubbornly staring at a canvas as if sheer will could conjure creativity), but in I Walk the Line, he shows no contempt for Henry Tawes, no matter how ludicrous his infatuation with his young lover becomes.
John Frankenheimer’s nuanced portrayal of the both pathetic and poignant Henry Tawes succeeds because the director subverts his star’s established persona, in a manner akin to Ford’s approach in The Searchers or Hitchcock’s in Vertigo. Just as those films hinge on the tension created between the destructive, neurotic behaviors of characters played by John Wayne or James Stewart and the audience’s ingrained desire to identify with their usually likeable screen images, I Walk the Line dismantles the To Kill a Mockingbird-era image of Gregory Peck. The man initially perceived as another wise, taciturn Southern authority figure is gradually exposed as a repressed, ineffective figure of ridicule, whose silence conceals only dullness and a lack of inner strength. Peck’s inherent dignity allows us to be shocked by the extent of Henry’s degradation and yet, paradoxically, redeems the character even in his most debased moments. Less precisely, Seconds had questioned assumptions about Rock Hudson’s physical attractiveness; and The Gypsy Moths’ reunion of the middle-aged Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, awkwardly embracing on a living room sofa, can be interpreted as a bittersweet counterpoint to their iconic romantic scene in the surf in From Here to Eternity.
Many accounts attribute John Frankenheimer’s noticeable career decline to personal tragedies: the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a friend who was staying at the director’s Malibu home at the time of his death; a period of severe alcoholism spanning from Black Sunday to The Challenge (1982); and a willingness to accept less demanding projects in order to live and work in Europe. However, The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line together constitute a coherent personal statement as profound as any filmmaker might produce, and the collective critical and popular indifference towards both films must have left John Frankenheimer questioning what more he could do to gain recognition within his field. Had either film received proper acclaim, John Frankenheimer might have spent the following decade creating mature, sensitive films in the vein of Robert Altman or Sam Peckinpah. With that avenue seemingly closed to him, John Frankenheimer’s subsequent output became creatively inconsistent and often purely commercially driven.
After the largely unseen Impossible Object (1973), all of John Frankenheimer’s theatrical releases can be categorized as action films. While individual sequences often demonstrated his technical brilliance, none of his later works possessed the lean, unpretentious efficiency of genre films directed by Don Siegel or Andre de Toth. Disenchanted with the “action director” label he had always resisted, John Frankenheimer made increasingly cynical films. His work in the late 1970s and 1980s is not so much impersonal as it is crude and morally ambiguous, as if the visuals were designed to accompany the cold synthesizer scores of Ennio Morricone and Gary Chang, rather than the other way around. The lasting impressions from these films are predominantly brutal and sordid: the pistol-in-mouth interrogation in Black Sunday, the offensive gay and racial stereotypes in 52 Pick-Up (1986), and the unromantic love scenes in Year of the Gun (1991). Infamously, in Dead Bang (1989), the hungover detective protagonist (Don Johnson) vomits on a thug he has just apprehended. One might surmise that John Frankenheimer was attempting to push the boundaries of pulp sensationalism in some of these films, but often the viewer feels more like the target of his bitterness.
Hopes for a career resurgence arose in the 1990s when John Frankenheimer found a new outlet directing made-for-cable movies. The scripts and casts were significantly better than what he had been offered in previous years, and the subject matter – often recent historical events, including biopics of George Wallace and Lyndon Johnson – echoed the political themes of John Frankenheimer’s prime. Ronin (1998) was perceived by some as a return to form for John Frankenheimer. David Mamet’s opaque screenplay added little to Frankenheimer’s earlier explorations of masculine posturing, but the director did stage an extended, thrilling car chase sequence that arguably served as cinema’s farewell to the pre-digital action scene. If action was to be his epitaph, at least John Frankenheimer maintained his mastery of it until the very end.
Comparing John Frankenheimer to Jean-Luc Godard might seem far-fetched, but consider this: both were born in the same year, and they shared admiration for many of the same classic Hollywood directors. Each became the most formally innovative and politically engaged filmmaker in their respective countries during the early 1960s. Both directors experienced a decline in critical favor around the same time, as Frankenheimer moved towards mainstream filmmaking and Godard towards increasingly obscure and experimental work.
Is there a vast imaginative chasm between the revolutionary spirit of the French New Wave and the established classical style within which John Frankenheimer began his career? Undoubtedly, and this may partly explain why contemporary critics consistently undervalued John Frankenheimer’s accomplishments. Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, writing during John Frankenheimer’s peak period, both dismissed him as an overambitious but ultimately minor talent, Sarris criticizing his “synthetic technique,” and Kael his tendency towards “sanctimoniousness.” Manny Farber deemed The Gypsy Moths “singularly square.”
A re-evaluation of John Frankenheimer‘s career is warranted. His reverence for the work of Wyler and Welles connects him to the classicism of the late studio era, yet in retrospect, The Gypsy Moths and I Walk the Line foreshadow the style and thematic concerns of the American New Wave. In his 1960s films, one can trace the lineage between the terse professionalism of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher in the 1950s and the messy, visceral violence of Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin in the 1970s, and the bridge between the contained emotionalism of Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray and the raw humanism of Altman and John Cassavetes. John Frankenheimer’s rightful place in cinema history is as a crucial transitional figure between these two significant eras.
Endnotes
Filmography
Theatrical Features
The Young Stranger (1957)
The Young Savages (1961)
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
All Fall Down (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Seven Days in May (1964)
The Train (1965)
Seconds (1966)
Grand Prix (1966)
The Extraordinary Seaman (1967; released 1969)
The Fixer (1968)
The Gypsy Moths (1969)
I Walk the Line (1970)
The Horsemen (1971)
The Iceman Cometh (1973)
Impossible Object aka Story of a Love Affair (1973)
99 and 44/100% Dead (1974)
The French Connection II (1975)
Black Sunday (1977)
Prophecy (1979)
The Challenge (1982)
The Holcroft Covenant (1985)
52 Pick-Up (1986)
Dead Bang (1989)
The Fourth War (1990)
Year of the Gun (1991)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Ronin (1998)
Reindeer Games (2000)
Select Bibliography
Charles Champlin (ed.), John Frankenheimer: A Conversation with Charles Champlin, Riverwood, Burbank, 1995.
Gerald Pratley, The Films of Frankenheimer, Cygnus Art/Lehigh University Press, Bethlehem, PA, 1998.
Articles in Senses of Cinema
A Key Unturned: Seconds by Peter Wilshire
Web Resources
Archive of American Television Interview with John Frankenheimer Parts 1-13 Frankenheimer’s six-hour oral history can be viewed for free, in thirty-minute segments.
John Frankenheimer Survives Hollywood Interview by Tim Rhys and Ian Bage in Issue 18 (April 1996) of Moviemaker.
John Frankenheimer The Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Encyclopedia of Television overview of Frankenheimer’s television work.
John Frankenheimer Memorial Gallery The Directors Guild of America’s Frankenheimer Memorial Photo Gallery.
Film Directors – Articles on the Internet Several online articles can be found here
Click here to buy John Frankenheimer DVDs and videos at Facets
Click here to search for John Frankenheimer DVDs, videos and books at
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