The Director as Survivor : John Frankenheimer has overcome personal and professional setbacks to direct yet another political thriller

Their stories are the tragic underside of fame and fortune, Hollywood-style: Bright young talents who storm from the starting gate at breakneck speed only to slam into brick walls of their own making. Promising careers are destroyed by drink or drugs, or the pressures of a fickle business, or as penance for their own tempestuous reputations.

More than once, director John Frankenheimer nearly joined that body count. But it would be foolish to write this celebrated film maker off as a Hollywood has-been. The one-time boy wonder of live TV--who went on to direct such critically acclaimed films as “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Birdman of Alcatraz” in his early 30s--turns 60 in February and he’s not talking about retirement. Frankenheimer is more determined than ever to recapture the glory of his early career.

“I have a strong will to survive,” says Frankenheimer, a man who seems only vaguely aware of the power and authority his 6-foot, 3-inch frame still commands. “I don’t like to lose. I have a belief in myself that in spite of it all I could do certain things.” The walls of his Santa Monica office, where Frankenheimer sits this warm afternoon, are crammed with mounted marlins weighing as much as 1,200 pounds, trophies from his deep sea fishing days with his now-estranged wife, Evans Evans.

Next weekend, the American Cinematheque will honor Frankenheimer at the Directors Guild with a retrospective of his work that includes “The Young Savages” and “Birdman of Alcatraz,” both starring Burt Lancaster; “The Manchurian Candidate” with Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra; “Seconds,” his nightmarish 1966 film that was booed at the Cannes Film Festival but has since become a cult favorite; “All Fall Down,” which helped launch Warren Beatty to stardom in 1962; “The Iceman Cometh,” starring Lee Marvin and Fredric March, and “Black Sunday,” the 1977 thriller in which Frankenheimer sent a terrorist-controlled blimp into Super Bowl Sunday.

“He’s a man whom a lot of people--critics and his colleagues in the industry--consider to be a director’s director,” says Gary Essert, artistic director of the Cinematheque. “And he produces movies that grab an audience. Audiences react to his movies, they respond.”

Frankenheimer’s early career glittered. By age 30, he had collected five Emmy nominations for his live TV dramas--like his piercing look at alcoholism, “Days of Wine and Roses”--on CBS’ “Playhouse 90.” By age 33, he was the preferred screen director for one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Burt Lancaster. By age 38, he had an intimate relationship with the nation’s most glamorous political leader, Bobby Kennedy. “He was enormously hot,” recalls Sydney Pollack, who owes his own start as a director to Frankenheimer, “a real Wunderkind .”

During the 1968 primary campaign, Frankenheimer was at Kennedy’s side, not only as director of campaign commercials but also as a friend. But in the decades following Kennedy’s murder--on a spring night at the Ambassador Hotel, as Frankenheimer waited outside to drive him back to his Malibu home--the director’s career began to slide. By 1980, Frankenheimer could still command $1 million a movie, but not for the kind of work that rated much notice from critics or audiences. For the better part of the last two decades, Frankenheimer has sat on the periphery of Hollywood movie-making.

A string of poor movie choices in the 1970s, combined with his reputation as an enfant terrible, took their toll. But Frankenheimer blames alcoholism for many of his troubles. By the late 1970s, he was literally dying from drink. “I came this close to cirrhosis of the liver,” Frankenheimer says, leaning forward, his eyes recalling his fear as he pinches his thumb and forefinger together.

That’s behind him since he sought help for his alcoholism eight years ago. Since then, close friends note dramatic changes in Frankenheimer. “Until the last eight years, there was a lot of inner torment,” says Evans, Frankenheimer’s wife of 26 years. (The couple recently separated.) “He’s come to deal with a lot of those things. He’s much more philosophical.”

Still, Frankenheimer faces serious obstacles as he tries to stage a comeback. So far, a commercial hit has eluded Frankenheimer in the 1980s. And critics, while sometimes kind to his recent directorial efforts, very often express a longing for a return to the technically daring black-and-white films that first turned him into a star. “You wonder if the super-conventional movie-making styles of the ‘80s don’t inhibit him a little,” L.A. Times critic Michael Wilmington wrote in 1985.

That’s not Frankenheimer’s only problem. The star directors today--like Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols or Sydney Pollack, who have recent hits under their belts--gain access to the best projects in town, not John Frankenheimer. In some cases, Frankenheimer has been forced to compromise to get work--as he did when he accepted Lorimar’s directive that Don Johnson star in his 1989 cop adventure, “Dead Bang,” a box-office flop.

Frankenheimer’s story is the all too common one of a faded star trying to resurrect his career in an industry notorious for its short memory. “He’s in the same boat as many great Hollywood actors: With the right project he can be back on top in a minute,” says Wolf Schmidt, president of the independent European company, Kodiak Films.

Schmidt hopes that “right project” will be Frankenheimer’s next film, “The Fourth War,” financed by Kodiak. (Cannon will distribute the film in U.S. theaters next year.) More than anything that Frankenheimer has directed in the 1980s, “The Fourth War” recalls the kind of political thrillers that made Frankenheimer such a hot commodity in the 1960s--films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Seven Days in May” and “The Train.”

In “The Fourth War,” Roy Scheider is an American colonel, and Jurgen Prochnow his Russian counterpart, who square off across the West German-Czechoslovakian border. The film is set against an atmosphere of glasnost , leaving these two militaristic men uncomfortably out of time and place, like Harley bikers at a performance of the “Nutcracker” ballet.

Frankenheimer shot the film early this year, during a bitterly cold winter and spring in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Calgary. He needed a setting with fresh snow on the ground for the film--and he got it, as well as searing winds and temperatures that plummeted to 40 degrees below zero. By April, as production began to wrap up, it seemed that nerves would be frayed and tempers would flare.

But on a cold crisp day that month, Frankenheimer was in high spirits. So, it seemed, was the cast and crew. “I feel better than I’ve ever felt,” he says. “I feel more positive about my career and my life than I felt before the Bobby Kennedy assassination.”

Especially in these kinds of moods, Frankenheimer refuses to dwell on--or often even acknowledge--the fact that his career is not where it was in the 1960s. “People (who say that) weren’t around in the 1960s,” he says. “Those pictures were very hard to make. There were a lot of ups and downs.”

Other times he is more open and candid about how difficult it has been to stage a comeback. It didn’t take many hours on the Calgary set to realize that one reason for his good mood was that the smooth production on “The Fourth War” contrasted sharply with the relentless problems on the Canadian set of his last film, “Dead Bang.”

While Frankenheimer won’t discuss any details about that production, crew members--many of whom worked on both films--say “Dead Bang” lead Don Johnson spent almost as much time playing the role of “temperamental star” as he did playing his real role as an alcoholic L.A. cop. That, crew sources say, led to serious tensions between Johnson and Frankenheimer, as well as others on the set. (A spokesman for Johnson said that the actor was unavailable for comment.)

Frankenheimer refuses to answer any questions specifically about Johnson. But he does say this: “Once a movie starts and you find yourself in a situation where you have a very difficult star, it’s like you’re a hostage. There’s nothing you can do. You’ve got to get through it. (As the director), you can say, ‘I’m not going to continue here, find someone else.’ But that’s tough to do if you’ve created the project and worked with the writer on it from the beginning.”

The casting of Johnson was not Frankenheimer’s original intention. Lorimar would only make the film if Johnson starred, a fact confirmed by former Lorimar chief Bernie Brillstein. Frankenheimer agreed to Brillstein’s demands, not only because he liked the project but also, he says, because he needed a job.

“It’s terribly difficult in this environment we’re in--because of the changes in the studio environment--to get a picture made,” says Frankenheimer. “I hadn’t done a movie for a year, since ’52 Pick-Up.’ ”

On its release, “Dead Bang” flopped; critics reviewing Frankenheimer’s work sounded like teachers urging a prize pupil to quit underselling himself. From Vincent Canby of the New York Times: “John Frankenheimer, the director of one of the wittiest conspiracy movies ever made, ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ is now responsible for one of the more trivial, ‘Dead Bang.’ ” From the L.A. Times’ Wilmington: “Frankenheimer is wasting his time with material like this.”

Part of his problem in recent years, says Frankenheimer, is finding fresh material. “Let me tell you how it works,” he says. “You got to get lucky and get a big hit. Once you get the big hit, and especially based on all the body of work that’s behind me, then anything is possible. Otherwise, it’s really a struggle to get pictures made, and to get the right material. What you don’t want to do is just continually get material with fingerprints all over it. You’ve got to get yourself in a position where material is being submitted to you before it’s being submitted to anybody else.”

Being a loner in Hollywood hasn’t helped either. For the past 20 years, Frankenheimer has lived on and off in his Malibu home--but he has stayed away from the social swirl of the town. He doesn’t have many friends in “the business.” While his peers were living in New York or on L.A.’s Westside, plugging away at their careers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frankenheimer was off in Europe--learning to speak fluent French and taking cooking lessons at the Cordon Bleu. The son of a New York stockbroker, Frankenheimer has always displayed an affinity for the good life. In some Hollywood circles, he has gained a reputation as an elitist.

But Frankenheimer, who now lives in L.A., has always kept to himself. When he was 17, his father was so worried about his introverted teen-age son that he had him tested at a psychological institute--where he scored high in creativity, but low in the social relations department. He was an outstanding student at both LaSalle Military College and, later, at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., but he rebelled against both institutions.

He was drawn into drama at Williams, and made a brief foray into acting after college. A few years later, he landed a job as an assistant director at CBS television. And it was there--in live television during the 1950s--that Frankenheimer first made his mark as a director. With charged story lines and innovative use of camera angles, Frankenheimer’s contributions to CBS’ “Playhouse 90” drew critical acclaim and Emmy nominations.

“It was very exciting,” Frankenheimer recalls. “If they had live television right now, I’d still be doing it. You had total control as a director. It was live, so we had final cut. And you had no such thing as a difficult actor.”

Like such peers in live TV as Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn, Frankenheimer brought his innovations to feature films. “He brought a whole kind of kinetic experience” to TV and later to theaters, recalls writer George Axelrod (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”). “Part of what he sold was youthful excitement.”

His early feature films, always shot in black-and-white, drew even more attention. Burt Lancaster fought with Frankenheimer on the set of the director’s second film, “The Young Savages,” but soon enough was demanding Frankenheimer’s services on four others--including “Birdman of Alcatraz” and “The Train.”

In 1966, Frankenheimer capped a string of political thrillers with “Grand Prix,” a splashy look at big-time car racing--one of Frankenheimer’s great passions. Making that film, he said, “was like a Walter Mitty dream come true.” Racing cars was not Frankenheimer’s only masculine hobby: In another era, he was an equally avid deep-sea fisherman, wrestling with 1,000 pound marlins.

This Hemingway side of Frankenheimer’s personality is reflected in his movies. You won’t find much romance or many complex leading ladies in a Frankenheimer film: For the most part, his character are men, real men, fighting each other or some outside force trying to destroy a way of life. His films also are known for their biting, often satiric, look at this country’s political and social times.

“He brings an intelligence to his films,” says Roy Scheider, who also starred in “52 Pick-Up.” “It’s no accident that the best films of his career have been political and polemical and philosophical. He has his own sense of moral justice.”

The first blow to Frankenheimer’s career was a personal one--when his close relationship with Bobby Kennedy ended in tragedy. “I didn’t like him very much at first,” Frankenheimer says, “but watching him grow, I became more and more committed.”

On the night of the 1968 California primary, when he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy was scheduled to return to Frankenheimer’s Malibu home. While waiting for Kennedy at the entrance to the ballroom, Frankenheimer felt a person brush by; to this day, he’s certain it was Sirhan Sirhan. Late that night, after the gunshots and the commotion, when at last it became clear that Kennedy had been critically wounded, Frankenheimer returned home alone--where six rented TV sets that Kennedy had requested sat eerily in the living room. After Kennedy’s death, Frankenheimer says, “I went through a period of severe depression.”

“I think John had a middle-age crisis earlier than most,” says Axelrod. “After (Kennedy’s murder) he lost heart.”

He and Evans moved to Europe, and while he continued to make films both there and in the U.S., his reputation and commercial success began to slide. Forgotten films from that period include “The Fixer,” “The Gypsy Moths,” “99 and 44/100% Dead” and “Impossible Object” (which Frankenheimer had to finance with his credit card after the European producer went broke).

Frankenheimer’s 1973 version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” received good reviews and remains one of Frankenheimer’s own favorites. But it wasn’t distributed widely and didn’t find much of an audience. He then directed more commercial fare, including “French Connection II” in 1975 and “Black Sunday” in 1977. The latter, which holds up on video as a compelling edge-of-your-seat thriller, was hurt at the box office on its release because of the parallel timing of a similar film, “Two-Minute Warning.”

By the late 1970s, though, Frankenheimer was making films that slipped into obscurity, including “Prophecy” and “The Challenge.” His drinking was also taking a toll on his physical and mental health. “I did some things that I regret,” he says, “made some professional decisions that I regret. And, of course, it was because of (the alcoholism).”

Two films that Frankenheimer made since seeking out help for his drinking, have received generally good receptions from film critics. But neither “The Holcroft Covenant” nor “52 Pick-Up,” based on an Elmore Leonard crime novel, did much business at the box office.

What gave Frankenheimer his biggest career boost in recent years was the 1988 re-release of “The Manchurian Candidate.” The dark thriller film about a communist conspiracy to take control of the U.S. government may have drawn a mixed reaction when it was released in 1962; but on its re-release 26 years later, critics rushed to dub it an American classic. “This picture may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood,” New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote.

“It’s done me a lot of good,” Frankenheimer says of the re-release. “Anytime people say you’ve directed a classic . . . well, most people haven’t directed anything that 20 years later they want to be remembered for.”

As 1990 approaches, Frankenheimer says his career is on the rebound, “almost back to where it was in the 1960s.” All he needs now is that elusive commercial hit, he says. “You’re not going to have a huge hit by talking about it. You just have to be up at bat a lot.”