LYCOS RETRIEVER 
John Frankenheimer: Manchurian Candidate
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Frankenheimer directs Seconds as the nightmare that it is, with many of the same wonky camera angles he used in The Manchurian Candidate. He is completely comfortable in the long shot and the close-up, as well as in long, unbroken takes, and several fantastically-edited, angst-ridden sequences. A veteran of television’s early days, Frankenheimer surrounds Hudson and Randolph with reliable character actors from the 1950s and 1960s, who are able to sketch their roles with quick professionalism. Among them is Murray Hamilton, one of cinema’s great cuckolds (he was Mr. Robinson in The Graduate) and the embodiment of inept local government (he was the mayor from Jaws).
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More than that, though, Frankenheimer had a long and important career as a filmmaker, and leaves a filmography that should make most young filmmakers today tremble in awe. This is the guy who directed BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY and THE TRAIN and SECONDS. Any one of those movies would be enough to cement his name, but to have essentially directed them back to back to back is staggering.
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Only the 1987 theatrical re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, after decades of unavailability, earned Frankenheimer high critical praise. In fact, the film was atop many critics' lists as among the best to come to movie houses that year. Additionally, the emergence of the high-tech thriller genre, so popular in the 1990s, has been critically traced back to The Train. From the mid-1990s, you might say that Frankenheimer returned to his professional roots, re-crossing that bridge between theatrical films and television. He did not completely abandon big-screen features, directing one generic espionage yarn (Ronin), one pedestrian crime tale (Reindeer Games), and an undistinguished adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau.
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The Manchurian Candidate (1962) confirmed Frankenheimer's strong visual sense. His adaptation of Richard Condon's uneasily prophetic novel was the first film he instigated and over which he had complete control. It has become part of the country's folklore. Rock Hudson gave his most interesting performance in Seconds (1966), an eerie variation on the Faust legend in which he plays a middle-aged businessman who pays a mysterious outfit to let him start out in another life by faking his death and making surgical alterations.
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At 7:15 p.m. Frankenheimer drove the presidential candidate to the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel that evening to hear the results. Later that evening, after giving a speech, the politician was felled by an assassin.
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The breakthrough in Frankenheimer's career came in the same year (1962) with The Manchurian Candidate, based on a novel by Richard Condon. Witty and intelligent, it argued that a figure evidently modelled on Senator Joseph McCarthy was in reality a dupe of the communists - specifically of his wife, who uses him and her own son as pawns in a convoluted plot to put a puppet in the White House.
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Manchurian Candidate