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Tuesday, July 09, 2002

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

In a way, John Frankenheimer's career ended where it had started, directing for television. Yet, after more than half a century, nothing was really the same.

	In 1998, Mare Winningham and John Frankenheimer congratulated each other on their Emmy awards for their work on the cable movie "George Wallace." (Reed Saxon, Associated Press)

Frankenheimer, who died Saturday at age 72, won four Emmy Awards in five years during the 1990s, making movies about provocative subjects, including the Attica prison uprising, Alabama Gov. George Wallace and the infamous Civil War POW camp Andersonville. His final film, "Path to War," examined how President Lyndon Johnson allowed his advisers to lead him into the morass of Vietnam.

The director was no stranger to stories that explored how men of action struggled to escape from real or metaphoric straitjackets, often of their own making.

He will be best remembered for a trio of cinematic gems from the early 1960s: "Birdman of Alcatraz," with Burt Lancaster portraying the true-life murderer whose life in solitary was redeemed by his fascination with birds; "The Manchurian Candidate," about an American soldier brainwashed by his North Korean captors in a plot to manipulate a presidential election; and "Seven Days in May," with Frederic March as an American president facing an attempted military coup.

But for all his success in the medium, movies were not Frankenheimer's first love and probably not even his second.

He cut his teeth on live drama during television's so-called Golden Age of the 1950s. His colleagues included Arthur Penn, who went on to make "Bonnie and Clyde," and Franklin Schaffner, who later directed "Patton." They staged plays written by Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, among others.

"Those were great days," he told me in a 1998 Post-Gazette interview. "If it had kept going, I would never have left."

But live television drama died as television production moved from New York to Los Angeles and gave up the energetic unpredictability of live broadcasts for the controlled -- and repeatable -- certainty of film.

So Frankenheimer brought to the big screen the lessons he had learned on the small one -- how to tell a story with no margin for error, how to bring a strong visual sense to screenplays that were sometimes dense with dialogue.

But he also enjoyed portraying action on the screen, in a way he never could in the confines of a TV studio.

"The Train" centered on an Allied plot to stop a Nazi railroad shipment of stolen art treasures without damaging the cargo. "The Gypsy Moths" followed a troupe of skydivers barnstorming through the Midwest. "Grand Prix" was set in the world of automobile racing. Frankenheimer said he was labeled "highway menace" in his college yearbook. "I race. Cars, they are my passion," he said in the 1998 interview.

Most of the films he made after 1970 pale in comparison to his '60s output, with one exception. "Black Sunday," made in 1977, put Frankenheimer in his element, recounting the tale of a terrorist scheme to detonate a nuclear weapon during the Super Bowl -- essentially the same plot told in the current film "The Sum of All Fears" (both movies were adapted from novels).

His last three cinematic efforts were disappointing: a disastrous remake of "The Island of Dr. Moreau" that led to Frankenheimer saying there wasn't enough money in the world to get him to work with Val Kilmer again; "Ronin," about spies left out in the cold by the end of the Cold War; and "Reindeer Games," an absurd, violent thriller about a murderous plot to rob a casino.

So it was left to television, and Frankenheimer's string of superior made-for-cable films, to restore his reputation. In that sense, his career came full circle and achieved a satisfying closure.