DVD Pick of the Month: February

The John Frankenheimer Collection

By D.K. Holm

One of the soon-to-be-missed virtues of the old-fashioned DVD was that, thanks to its economy (they didn’t cost all that much to make), distributors could celebrate actors, directors, or themes with unified sets of films culled from the studio’s holdings. Thus we have seen everything from collections of Val Lewton’s near-complete succession of influential psychological horror films, to Ford at Fox, the epical (and epically expensive) collection of that director’s diverse work. In between is Eclipse, the new branch of Criterion that has issued collections of everything from Samuel Fuller’s first three films to Carlos Saura’s Flamenco movies.
  
These kinds of collections may soon bite the dust, though, as discs become more expensive with the advent and popularity of Blu-Ray or HD, and regular DVDs are phased out. The only hope is that, come a dramatic increase in bandwidth, consumers can assemble their own collections downloadable from the Internet, with no expensive storage-playback media involved at all.
 
The John Frankenheimer Collection, as the box of four of the director’s films is titled, may therefore be one of the last of its kind, just as Frankenheimer himself was part of a dying breed, one in a chain of vigorous, masculinist directors with a social conscience stretching back to William Wellman and progressing thence through Nicholas Ray, William Friedkin, and Oliver Stone. The four films collected here, one of them on DVD for the first time, track Frankenheimer’s career from his earliest social protest films through his late refried action assignments.  
 
John Frankenheimer began as a 1950s TV director, back when original plays on the tube could be provocative and socially conscious. The Young Savages was his second film, a trial story with Burt Lancaster as a prosecuting attorney trying three gang members who stabbed a blind boy. The case is loosely based on the famous Capeman case that Paul Simon also adapted for his short-lived musical, and it is very much in the spirit of Ray’s Knock on any Door and Richard Brooks’s The Blackboard Jungle. What’s unusual, however, is how early in his career Frankenheimer’s visual style was on display—a harsh, contrast-y, realistic black-and-white using dramatic close-ups and triangulated compositions. The surrealistic political commentary of The Manchurian Candidate contains some of this look but is more like a big budget TV show in its appearance. The style resurfaces in The Train, a terrific action film set in the final days of the German occupation of France, with Lancaster again given the task of preventing a trainload of French art finding its way into enemy territory. Though the film suffers from a tepid second half, it looks great, is rigorously realistic, and the athletic Lancaster, who was in his early 50s at the time, performs some awesome stunts. Ronin, Frankenheimer’s second-to-last feature, is a tired, convoluted chase film that fails to engage, but shows how Hollywood had settled on viewing the director.
  
The Young Savages has no supplementary features, but all the others have the supplements that came with their last released editions (including Frankenheimer audio commentary tracks), now repackaged. It may be for completists only, but this collection still serves as a fine intro to the surprising diversity of Frankenheimer’s career. MGM Home Entertainment’s 4-disc John Frankenheimer Collection retails for $39.95.