LYCOS RETRIEVER 
John Frankenheimer: Manchurian Candidate
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John Frankenheimer brings his notorious love of complicated characters and trademark attention to riveting details to REINDEER GAMES, his latest suspense thriller. Frankenheimer is renowned for films that explore underlying social and philosophical themes in a relentlessly exciting manner. His work includes Birdman of Alcatraz and The Fixer, which both explore the indomitable human spirit; Seven Days In May, which details the political suspense of a U.S. military coup; The Manchurian Candidate, an indictment of the McCarthy Era; The Train, which questions the value of art versus a human life; and Black Sunday and Year of the gun, which confront international terrorism.
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Frankenheimer returned to the screen in 1961 with The Young Savages. A crime drama that featured Burt Lancaster as its lead, it was a reasonable critical success, and Frankenheimer decided to give feature film another go. He followed the film with the black and white Warren Beatty/Eva Marie Saint melodrama All Fall Down in 1962 and that same year made what many consider to be one of his greatest masterpieces, Birdman of Alcatraz. A stirring prison drama starring Lancaster as its titular hero, the film garnered a number of international honors, including four Oscar nominations. 1962 was truly one of the best years of Frankenheimer's career, as in addition to the triumph of Birdman, the director made another of his most celebrated works, The Manchurian Candidate. However, the film did not enjoy an exceedingly warm reception upon its original 1962 release; a taut, thoroughly chilling psychological thriller that featured an incomparable performance from Angela Lansbury as the world's worst mother, The Manchurian Candidate would have to wait until its 1987 re-release to earn its deserved recognition as one of the Cold War's most enduring and damning cinematic mementos.
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Frankenheimer made his finest film, The Manchurian Candidate, in 1962. Based on Richard Condon's novel, The Manchurian Candidate is a tense thriller leavened by black humor. Predating and predicting the political assassinations that swept the nation in the 1960s, the film was suppressed for 25 years after John F. Kennedy's murder. It tells the story of a Korean War soldier brainwashed into becoming an assassin for the Communists, and the old Army buddy out to stop him. Managing to tread a very thin Cold War line, it attacks both Communism and McCarthyism.
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In 1956, Frankenheimer made his feature film debut with The Young Stranger, starring James MacArthur. He later became a major influence on the psychological thriller with the nightmarish tale of political intrigue, The Manchurian Candidate, which remains a prescient classic studied in film schools around the world. The film garnered an Academy Award nomination and was voted Best Motion Picture of 1962 by Film Daily. The film was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Registry in 1992.
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Frankenheimer's audio commentaries on Ronin, The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, and The Holcroft Covenant are fabulous. Blessed by a great memory and an enthusiasm for filmmaking that hasn't dimmed over the years, Frankenheimer offers commentaries that blend the personal and the practical. He's generous to a fault, quick to point out the contributions of his writers, editors, production designers, and the rest of his crew. He loves actors and never fails to point out highlights in performances, not just from his stars, but from his stuntmen and supporting actors as well.
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Before The Gypsy Moths, most of Frankenheimer's movies had been about men. The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and The Train were all masculine contests of wills; Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Grand Prix and The Fixer (1968) were all set in worlds of exclusively male endeavour, with female characters present only as afterthoughts. Yet we find in Frankenheimer none of the anguished treatises on courage and bravado, or the repellent streaks of misogyny, that there are in Sam Peckinpah, and certainly not the bellicose endorsement of brawling and bullies that was John Ford's Achilles' heel. Often it seemed that Frankenheimer was simply drawn to settings that recalled the comfortable memories of his live TV apprenticeship: sweaty, fast-moving, all-male bullpens of ego and power politics.
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Manchurian Candidate