A Life Well-Lived

Hollywood has decided to remake the classic 1962 film, "The Manchurian Candidate." It is a painful reminder that we no longer have Lawrence Harvey around anymore. Through his twitchy performance and the film, we learn solitaire is the only game in town. Nor do we have Sinatra, who, like the rest of the cast, was amazingly good in the film. It includes John McGiver, James Gregory and yes ... Whit Bissell. Let's thank God for Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury. There are moments in cinema that allow such talented elements tumble together and create a truly wonderful movie. Not to mention that, I, as a horror film fan, found this to be one of the scariest of all. Why? Because it is plausible.

In the original "Manchurian Candidate", the presidential candidate is secretly undermined by the man running on the second spot through the most nefarious techniques -- one is manipulating the media. The other might be described as the intelligence community on steroids. Sound familiar?

How about this line from Sinatra's character, Major Marco: "Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."

Perhaps the real genius beyond the first "Manchurian Candidate" is John Frankenheimer, who learned his craft by making training films for the Air Force and then became a television director during the 1950s. He used both experiences to give the film more starkness and credibility. No wonder Frankenheimer understood how manipulative sound bites would eventually replace critical analysis. The original story comes from novelist Richard Condon, who also wrote "Prizzi's Honor."

I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" the other night. I was riveted by David Amram's sophisticated score. Not the soupy stuff they tend to inflict on us in movie houses today. (David is a former San Francisco jazzer who performed a show last year at the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.) His strident soundtrack makes the story all the more terrifying.

Amazing to think Angela Lansbury was only a year older than Lawrence Harvey when they made the film. She played his incestuous, conniving mother in the film. Therein lies the lovely and sordid Greek tragedy theme. Lansbury's youthful beauty makes their relationship in the movie all the more lurid. Inexplicably, she still does not look all that different today.

Most of us know that in the 1960s Sinatra obtained the rights to the movie and pulled it from circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It came a little too close to home. In 1988 it was rereleased on video where Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reminisce a little. Sinatra said he had
never been so excited about a project in his movie career as he was about "Manchurian..."

The difference between then and now is the soldiers were brainwashed. Now the American public is. The soldiers, then and now, will tell the story.

But this column is about John Frankenhiemer, who died in July two years ago. I pull it from this archive (and from the Associated Press). Rosemary Clooney -- one of my favorite singers in the whole, wide world
-- used to talk about how the death of Robert Kennedy pushed her over the edge to addiction. That night in Los Angeles in 1968 also changed Frankenheimer. Years later he would openly admit he had trouble with addiction. Such a euphemism: an addiction is nothing but trouble. But he came to grips with it, acknowledging that it had cost him plenty. That is, he had stopped working -- the worst thing that could happen to an artist. I like the way he dealt with his subsequent depression: he went to France to become a chef. But, of course, he came back home to movies --- and to television -- crepe pans in hand, no doubt.

Frankenheimer represents to me what an artist is all about: someone who has the courage to be honest with himself and then share it with the world. His was a life well-lived.

So, meanwhile, why don't we pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com

LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2002 -- John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960's with classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Train,"
died of a massive stroke from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.

Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970's and 1980's because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990's with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death. "It's a town with a short memory: it grinds people up and throws them away," Mr. Frankenheimer told a reporter in 1998, shortly before the release of an action film, "Ronin," with Robert De Niro.

More recently, Mr. Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmys for best director for the television movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville," and "George Wallace." His last film, "Path to
War," an ambitious HBO drama about the Johnson administration's decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, was shown in May to strong reviews.

On the set of the film, veteran actors like Donald Sutherland, who played Clark Clifford, and Michael Gambon, who played President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that Mr. Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and energy amazed
them. "He has more energy than someone half his age," Mr. Gambon remarked.

The director Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a longtime friend of Mr. Frankenheimer, said: "John revolutionized everybody's way of looking at films. He had such a highly charged visual style, so full of energy; he brought us close up to things. Movies began to look different after John came along."

The actor Gary Sinise, who played the title role in "George Wallace" and worked with Mr. Frankenheimer on two other films, called him "a giant."

"He had directing in his blood," Mr. Sinise said. "He loved filmmaking. It gave him a great source of energy and passion. I met him later in his career, but never did I feel that I was working with someone whose best years were over. He just had this great passion and great vision and great love for making movies."

A tall, rangy figure with a craggy face and a surprisingly open and blunt style, Mr. Frankenheimer sometimes looked back on his career without bitterness or rancor.

He attributed his bleak years in part to a drinking problem that sometimes led to disastrous decisions in the 1970's. He said he stopped drinking in 1980.

"I had a drinking problem — it took a toll on me," he told The New York Times in 1998. "And the state of mind you're in when you have a problem like that, even when you're not drunk, is the most dangerous time.
Because you make decisions that are not totally in your best interest about your life, about your career choices and everything."

Of his decision to stop drinking, he recalled, "I said, `I can't go on like this — I figured I'd better do something about it, because otherwise I was going to die.' "

Compounding his personal difficulties was the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Frankenheimer and Senator Kennedy had developed a close friendship, and the filmmaker spent that year traveling with
him during his presidential campaign. In fact, on the last day of his life, Senator Kennedy was staying at Mr. Frankenheimer's home in Malibu. Mr. Frankenheimer drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles to celebrate his triumph in the California primary. It was there that Senator Kennedy was killed.

Decades after the assassination, Mr. Frankenheimer spoke of it in halting terms. "If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night," Mr. Frankenheimer said. "I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of
deep depression. It took a long time to get it back." Mr. Frankenheimer spent five years in France, taking cooking classes and directing sporadically.

Movie offers dwindled in the 1980's after several failures and a decline in his work. But his career revived in 1994, when he won an Emmy for HBO's searing prison drama "Against the Wall," about the bloody 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1930, the son of a stockbroker. "I came from a half-Irish, half-German-Jewish background, a very volatile mix," he once said with a laugh. He was active in theater at Williams College. During the Korean War, while he was in the Air Force making training films, he decided he wanted to direct movies. Soon afterward he was hired as an assistant director at CBS in New York, where he worked on weather and news broadcasts as well as shows like "Person to Person" and "You Are There."

Yes, we are there.