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John Frankenheimer: Burt Lancaster
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John Frankenheimer, grand maître du thriller politico-social, ouvre les hostilités avec Le temps du châtiment (1961), avec Burt Lancaster. Plus qu'un regard sur l'adolescence révoltée, ce film est un véritable document sur un quartier hispanique d'East Harlem. Séduit, Burt Lancaster réclame Frankenheimer pour L'évadé d'Alcatraz (1962). Le défi n'est pas mince : pour suivre l'histoire vraie d'un célèbre ornithologiste, le spectateur ne quitte jamais la cellule où le héros purge une peine à perpétuité. Mais impossible n'est pas Frankenheimer pour qui "le comble du raffinement [...] est d'utiliser des événements réels et de les raconter en termes de fiction tout en mélangeant les styles". Un crime dans la tête (1962) illustre ces propos : entre vérité et fiction, ce film passe en revue toutes les hypothèses possibles de l'élaboration d'un complot politique. Ce chef-d'oeuvre s'appuie sur une brillante distribution, avec notamment Frank Sinatra et Angela Lansbury.
This is one of John Frankenheimer's breathless gems--all marvelous action that never lets up. Burt Lancaster plays a French train engineer during the waning days of the German occupation who tries to prevent Nazi colonel Paul Scofield from transporting a precious art collection back to Germany. Utilizing sabotage and cunning deception, Lancaster and his Resistance colleagues stall for time with the Allies on their way. It's a brilliantly made film, showing off Lancaster's acrobatic skills (he performed all of his own stunts) and Frankenheimer's sense of pacing and brilliant use of space. It's choreographed with the utmost precision (those are real explosions during the pivotal strafing sequence) and extremely authentic in its details. Lancaster is in rare minimalist form, and Scofield manages to extract intelligence and sympathy.
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In 1956 Frankenheimer directed his first motion picture, The Young Stranger, starring James MacArthur, James Daly and Kim Hunter. In The Young Savages (1961), a story of juvenile criminals, based on Evan Hunter's novel A Matter of Conviction, Frankenheimer started his collaboration with Burt Lancaster. Lancaster played in Birdman of Alcatraz Robert Stroud, a murderer and a real life character, who becomes in jail the world's leading authority on caged bird diseases. The film was not a huge success in cinemas, but become popular in television. Frankenheimer had heated arguments with Lancaster about how to shoot scenes, and after finishing the film he swore he'd never work with the actor again. Two years later he made with Lancaster and Kirk Douglas Seven Days in May, a story of an attempted right-wing military coup.
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This same year saw Frankenheimer re-unite with one of the stars of Seven Days in May to make the five-star effort The Train. Arguably Frankenheimer's best effort, Burt Lancaster plays a railroad official in occupied France. At this point in the war, the Germans are looting Paris of its art treasures. Lancaster's character more than unwillingly helps his resistance colleagues keep the paintings from being stolen.
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After this, Lancaster enlisted Frankenheimer to pick up the reins of another film, The Train (1964). Rejecting the existing script, Frankenheimer shut down production at great cost pending a new draft. An intriguing story, set during World War II, it starred Paul Scofield as a German officer trying to steal the contents of a French museum as a bargaining ploy after the war. It was the last Frankenheimer film for which there was universal acclaim. His reputation never fully recovered from Seconds, although French Connection II (1975), in which detective Gene Hackman is turned into a drug addict and forced to undergo a "cold-turkey" cure, was held to be an acceptable sequel to William Friedkin's 1971 Oscar winner. Black Sunday (1976), about
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Sure enough, the first cut of the film was four and a half hours long, the length Frankenheimer had predicted. Moreover, as he had said at the beginning, the film was constructed so that it couldn't be cut and still be coherent. Frankenheimer said the film would have to be rewritten and partly reshot. Lancaster was committed to star in Judgment at Nuremberg, so he made that film while Frankenheimer prepared the reshoots. The finished film, released in 1962, was a huge success and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for Lancaster's performance.
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