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John Frankenheimer: New York
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John Frankenheimer se passionne pour le cinéma à partir de 1951, alors qu'il effectue son service militaire dans les forces aériennes des Etats-Unis. Il y réalise plusieurs documentaires. Démobilisé, il devient assistant metteur en scène de télévision pour la CBS à New York. John Frankenheimer dirige alors plus de 125 dramatiques et est considéré comme l'un des fondateurs de l'âge d'or de la télévision américaine.
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William Friedkin's huge hit The French Connection (1971) starred Gene Hackman as low-life New York narcotics cop Popeye Doyle; in Frankenheimer's French Connection II (1975), crude Francophobe Doyle has been sent to Marseilles in search of drug czar Fernando Rey. Duly kidnapped by the bad eggs, Doyle is shot full of heroin, then returned, near death, to the French police. In a performance full of pain and anger, Hackman brings a tragic depth to his ugly American. Claude Renoir's raw waterfront lensing is sensational, as is Cathleen Nesbitt's cameo as a wizened junkie. The punchy dialogue for Hackman's harrowing "cold turkey" scene was written—uncredited—by Pete Hamill. French Connection II not only surpasses the original—a case could be made for it as Frankenheimer's most impressive film.
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After the relative failure of Year of the Gun (1991), about a conspiracy that forms around an innocent American journalist in Rome, Frankenheimer did not make a film for five years. Instead, he focused on projects for television. These works were successful both with audiences and critics. His first movie was Against the Wall (1994) for the cable network, HBO. This was a personal story about the Attica prison riots that Frankenheimer shot in newsreel style. That same year, he took on another movie for HBO, The Burning Season, about Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist who fought against the exploitation of workers in the Amazon rain forest.
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Frankenheimer had the distinction of bridging several eras in studio filmmaking. He began directing television dramas in the early 1950s, when he was only in his 20s, and lived and worked long enough to direct feature and television films in a new century. However, his body of work is extremely uneven and needs to be carefully sifted for films of value. Possessed of a liberal sensibility and shaped by the Cold War era, Frankenheimer was an artistic eclectic, capable both of rising to the heights of challenging material and of adapting himself to truly miserable projects.
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While directing over 150 television plays for series like Climax, Ford Startime, Buick Electra Playhouse, Playhouse 90, and other anthology series, Frankenheimer worked with a number of accomplished actors, as well as future stars. They included Claudette Colbert, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, and Paul Newman. Some of the more famous episodes that Frankenheimer directed were "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "Journey to the Day."
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