The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (150 page)

He was terrific as Drew “Bundini” Brown in
Ali
(01, Mann);
Shade
(03, Damian Nieman);
Breakin’ all the Rules
(04, Daniel Taplitz). Then
Collateral
and
Ray
, followed by
Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story
(04, Vondie Curtis-Hall)—about an early member of the Crips gang;
Stealth
(05, Rob Cohen);
Jarhead
(05, Sam Mendes); as a male model in
Miami Vice
(06, Mann);
Dreamgirls
(06, Bill Condon);
The Kingdom
(07, Peter Berg).
The Soloist
(09, Joe Wright) was an ambitious disappointment, but a sign that Foxx may be cast in routine roles if he can’t carve out the exceptional for himself.

Kay Francis
(Katherine Edwina Gibbs) (1903–68), b. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Kay Francis was a short-lived bloom, as farfetched as the sophisticated romances of the early thirties where clothes
were
identity. But in
A Woman’s View
(1993), Jeanine Basinger makes a good case for remembering the intensity of Kay Francis’s brief impact, and the curiosity of her special reliance on the glamour (or religion) of clothes and jewels. She was a strange couture goddess who lived with the rumor that she had some black blood, as well as coded diaries that alluded to boozing and sleeping around. She soldiered on, despite a lisp that let her “r”s sound like “w”s; and despite a huge salary engineered by agent Myron Selznick who got her away from Paramount and over to Warner Brothers. In truth, that was a tough shift, for Paramount was a studio that loved clothes and those ladies who treasured them.

The daughter of actress Katherine Clinton, she went into the theatre and played opposite Walter Huston in
Elmer the Great
. He engineered her movie debut in
Gentlemen of the Press
(29, Millard Webb) and Paramount put her under contract. Several small parts, largely as dark seductresses, led to
Street of Chance
(30, John Cromwell), opposite William Powell. She was usually best in sympathetic, melting, and sacrificial parts—thus
The Virtuous Sin
(30, George Cukor and Louis Gasnier);
Scandal Sheet
(31, Cromwell);
The Vice Squad
(31, Cromwell);
Guilty Hands
(31, W. S. Van Dyke); and
Girls About Town
(31, Cukor).

She moved to Warners and they put her in
Man Wanted
(32) and
Jewel Robbery
(32), both directed by William Dieterle, before several great successes: the first again with William Powell,
One Way Passage
(32, Tay Garnett), in which she played a lover fatally ill; Ernst Lubitsch’s
Trouble in Paradise
(32), a witty and elegant return to Paramount; and
Cynara
(32, King Vidor). She continued with
The Keyhole
(33, Michael Curtiz);
Storm at Daybreak
(33, Richard Boleslavsky);
Mary Stevens M.D
. (33, Lloyd Bacon);
I Loved a Woman
(33, Alfred E. Green);
House on 56th Street
(33, Robert Florey);
Mandalay
(34, Curtiz);
Wonder Bar
(34, Bacon);
Dr. Monica
(34, William Keighley); as Lenin’s perfectly groomed secretary in
British Agent
(34, Curtiz);
Living on Velvet
(35, Frank Borzage);
Stranded
(35, Borzage); and
I Found Stella Parrish
(35, Mervyn Le Roy).

But her stock was declining and a Florence Nightingale biopic,
The White Angel
(36, Dieterle), proved disastrous. Warners persevered for a few years:
Give Me Your Heart
(36, Archie Mayo);
Stolen Holiday
(37, Curtiz);
Confession
(37, Joe May); and
Another Dawn
(37, Dieterle). Then in 1938 the studio demoted her to B pictures. She worked on for several years, but never survived the humiliation:
My Bill
(38, John Farrow);
Comet Over Broadway
(38, Busby Berkeley);
King of the Underworld
(39, Lewis Seiler); cruelly put down in
In Name Only
(39, Cromwell), where a child takes her for Cary Grant’s mother.

She left Warners and freelanced, taking mother roles, for instance in
It’s a Date
(40, William A. Seiter). There was a brief revival in the war years with the Jack Benny
Charley’s Aunt
(41, Mayo),
The Feminine Touch
(41, Van Dyke), and
Playgirl
(41, Frank Woodruff), while her war work was celebrated in
Four Jills in a Jeep
(44, Seiter). But she ended in Monogram cheapies, the last of which were
Divorce
(45, William Nigh) and
Wife Wanted
(46, Phil Karlson).

Georges Franju
(1912–87), b. Fougères, France
1934:
Le Métro
(codirected with Henri Langlois) (d). 1949:
Le Sang des Bêtes
(d). 1950:
En Passant par la Lorraine
(d). 1952:
Hôtel des Invalides
(d);
Le Grand Méliès
(d). 1953:
Monsieur et Madame Curie
(d). 1954:
Les Poussières
(d);
Navigation Marchande
(d). 1955:
A Propos d’une Rivière
(d). 1956:
Mon Chien
(d);
Le Théâtre Nationale Populaire
(d);
Sur le Pont d’Avignon
(d). 1957:
Nôtre-Dame, Cathédrale de Paris
(d). 1958:
La Première Nuit
(d);
La Tête Contre les Murs
. 1959:
Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes Without a Face
. 1961:
Pleins Feux sur l’Assassin
. 1962:
Thérèse Desqueyroux
. 1963:
Judex
. 1965:
Thomas l’Imposteur
. 1966:
Les Rideaux Blancs; Marcel Allain
. 1970:
La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret
. 1973:
Nuits Rouges/Shadowman
. 1978:
Le Dernier Mélodrame/The Last Melodrama
.

Franju’s films are fragile, fierce elegies against inhumanity. He has achieved single images that are among the most disturbing in the cinema: the slaughterhouse in
Le Sang des Bêtes;
the escape across burning stubble fields in
La Tête Contre les Murs;
the deathly oppressiveness of the woods in
Thérèse Desqueyroux;
quivering veterans in
Hôtel des Invalides;
Edith Scob’s precarious purity in
Eyes Without a Face
. Franju insists on the throb of surrealism within the matter-of-fact, and at his best the two modes interchange without strain. But there is often a feeling of contrivance as he attempts to coax lyricism out of horror, as in
Les Yeux Sans Visage
, or to assert universal madness, as in
La Tête Contre les Murs
and
Thomas l’Imposteur
.

More than with most directors, it is necessary to see his features—taken up only in middle age—as a continuation of work in documentary. In fact, there is something of a contrast between the intense, muddled anarchy of the features, and twenty years spent in documentary and the general service of the cinema. As early as 1934, Franju made a short,
Le Métro
, with Henri Langlois. Three years later, the two men founded the Cinémathèque Française. All through the war, Franju served as secretary of the International Federation of Film Archives. The personality of his films is not really that of an archivist or administrator, but the interest in early cinema is clear all through Franju’s own work: one of his most tender documentaries is
Le Grand Méliès
, a tribute to a forgotten innovator, who shared Franju’s own sense of fantasy; while
Judex
is a recreation of the vision of Louis Feuillade, a very entertaining movie, but more offhand and discursive than the Franju of
La Tête
—and
Les Yeux
—ever seemed capable of. More basically, Franju concentrates on the poetic resonance of pure visual narrative; he is often indifferent to plot or dialogue, but takes great pains over superb grey-and-white photography, invariably directed by Marcel Fradetal or Eugen Schufftan. Indeed, the presence of Schufftan, and the morbid view of a deranged, cruel world organized by misguided doctors, indicates Franju’s debt to classical German cinema.

His great documentaries show the alarming company that civilized society keeps with nightmare; this effect is achieved by photography that is beautiful but stark. Above all, in
Hôtel des Invalides
, the dry cataloguing of a national institution is penetrated by an anguish that is rare in strident antiwar films.

The features are all flawed to some extent by mistaken conception or unrealization, so that passages from Franju’s work seem more impressive than any single film. It is to the credit of Buñuel—a figure to whom Franju seems akin—that the Spaniard has so often found a form that expresses his calm fury. Franju, by contrast, is possessed by a furious but fluctuating grace. There are passages in
La Tête Contre les Murs
—the asylum gardens, the roulette scene, even the opening wasteland—that are as factual and as fantastic as
Sang des Bêtes
and
Hôtel des Invalides
. But Franju’s equation of helpless beasts and human creatures is facile and disproportionate because of his inability to sustain the vision against melodrama, a specious faith in innocent madness and whimsy.
Les Yeux sans Visage
is fearsome when content to be a horror picture, but shallow when it emerges from the genre.
Thomas l’Imposteur
is too preoccupied by the blithe chaos of the First World War for the stray moments of agony to be more than decoration.
Judex
is probably his most balanced film in that it successfully inhabits the old serial form and invests it with melancholy.

John Frankenheimer
(1930–2002) b. Malba, New York
1959:
The Young Stranger
. 1961:
The Young Savages
. 1962:
All Fall Down; Birdman of Alcatraz; The Manchurian Candidate
. 1964:
Seven Days in May
. 1965:
The Train
. 1966:
Seconds; Grand Prix
. 1968:
The Fixer
. 1969:
The Extraordinary Seaman; The Gypsy Moths
. 1970:
I Walk the Line; The Horsemen
. 1973:
The Iceman Cometh
(for TV). 1974:
99 and 44/100% Dead; Impossible Object
. 1975:
French Connection II
. 1977:
Black Sunday
. 1979:
Prophecy
. 1982:
The Challenge
. 1985:
The Holcroft Convenant
. 1986:
52 Pick-Up
. 1989:
Dead-Bang
. 1990:
The Fourth War
. 1991:
Year of the Gun. 1994: Against the Wall
(TV).
The Burning Season
(TV). 1996:
Andersonville
(TV);
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. 1997:
George Wallace
(TV). 1998:
Ronin
. 2000:
Reindeer Games
. 2001:
Ambush
(s). 2002:
Path to War
(TV).

In his first few years as a director there was a modish aura about Frankenheimer. He came from television and seemed sensitive to the problems of the young.
The Young Stranger
was a good debut, with a troubled puppy performance from James MacArthur and excellent smalltown atmosphere. But Frankenheimer gradually abandoned intimacy for glossy production values, a speculative eye on subject matter, and a flashy, insecure style.
All Fall Down
was his most accomplished film, with good performances from Warren Beatty, Eva Marie Saint, and Angela Lansbury, and some deliberate Wellesian deep-focus interiors.
The Manchurian Candidate
’s stunning set pieces (mostly coming from Richard Condon) do not disguise its real neglect of Americana. And the performances now seem good despite Frankenheimer’s busy interest in visual hysteria. At about this time, Frankenheimer became a little overshadowed by Burt Lancaster. That actor had been good in
The Young Savages
and
Birdman of Alcatraz
, even if the latter is too solemn a vehicle for his icy domination. But
Seven Days in May
only furthered Frankenheimer’s craze for TV screens within his frame, while
The Train
was a silliness from which Arthur Penn was lucky to escape. The division in Frankenheimer’s identity was clearly shown in 1966 with the arty pretentiousness of
Seconds
and the schoolboy thrills of
Grand Prix
. After that, he became hopelessly lost in adaptations of novels
—The Fixer
and
The Horsemen
—and twice attempted to recapture his sense of provincial America:
The Gypsy Moths
and
I Walk the Line
.

Frankenheimer’s films of the eighties were not an improvement, even if they were always quick and accomplished. He no longer had good material, and so it was hard to recollect his startling debut in the early sixties. However, when
The Manchurian Candidate
was rereleased, it had hardly dated. Also, I would say on reviewing
Seven Days in May
and
I Walk the Line
that these two films are a lot better than originally indicated—the first is a clockwork plot such as brings out Frankenheimer’s precision, yet it has time for several fine studies in loyalty and betrayal. As for
I Walk the Line
, it is a gradual rural tragedy, founded in hopeless infatuation, and inspired by one of Tuesday Weld’s best performances.

By 1994, Frankenheimer was back in TV with a story about the Attica riots. He was also frank about how far alcoholism had set him back in the late seventies and eighties.