The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (151 page)

Frankenheimer was emphatically back in the nineties, on the big and the small screens. But it’s instructive that
The Island of Dr. Moreau, Ronin
and
Reindeer Games
were worth so much less than his brilliant
George Wallace
, well written by Paul Monash, and starring Gary Sinise, Mare Winningham and Angelina Jolie. Anyone with Frankenheimer’s experience and talent will be better received nowadays by TV than by big-picture making.

Carl Franklin
, b. Richmond, California, 1949
1986:
Punk
. 1989:
Nowhere to Run; Eye of the Eagle II: Inside the Enemy
. 1990:
Full Fathom Five
. 1991:
One False Move
. 1993:
Laurel Avenue
(TV). 1995:
Devil in a Blue Dress
. 1998:
One True Thing
. 2002:
High Crimes
. 2003:
Out of Time
. 2010:
The Pacific
(episodes).

One False Move
is, quite simply, one of the best American movies of the nineties, in which the trappings of violent crime fall way to reveal a subtle story about family ties, rural feeling, and the varieties of love. There are also not many films that handle black and white characters without feeling intimidated by all the prospects. Put that film beside the period flavor and narrative intricacy of
Devil in a Blue Dress
and the intense family atmosphere of
One True Thing
, and you may begin to fathom exactly how hard it is for a black director to be employed as one of the best directors in America. One might slip out of the dilemma by saying that Franklin is “promising,” but he is in his early fifties already. It’s not just that he’s a lot better than Spike Lee, it’s more that he makes a Sydney Pollack look pale.

An actor and a writer as well as a director, Franklin was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and the American Film Institute, as well as the school of Roger Corman. He has cheerfully worked in exploitation junk, and don’t let anyone tell you that he’s anything less than ready and good enough for actresses as diverse as Cynda Williams, Renée Zellweger, and Meryl Streep.

Even so,
High Crimes
is an awful setback, and a quite unnecessary film.

Sidney A. Franklin
(1893–1972), b. San Francisco
1918:
Six Shooter Andy; Confession; Bride of Fear; The Safety Curtain; The Forbidden City; Her Only Way; Heart of Wetona
. 1919:
Probation Wife; Heart o’ the Hills; The Hoodlum
. 1920:
Two Weeks
. 1921:
Not Guilty; Unseen Forces; Courage
. 1922:
Smilin’ Through; The Primitive Lover; East Is West
. 1923:
Brass; Dulcy; Tiger Rose
. 1924:
Her Night of Romance
. 1925:
Learning to Love; Her Sister from Paris
. 1926:
The Duchess of Buffalo; Beverly of Graustark
. 1927:
Quality Street
. 1928:
The Actress
. 1929:
Wild Orchids; The Last of Mrs. Cheyney; Devil-May-Care
. 1930:
The Lady of Scandal; A Lady’s Morals
. 1931:
The Guardsman; Private Lives
. 1932:
Smilin’ Through
. 1933:
Reunion in Vienna
. 1934:
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
. 1935:
The Dark Angel
. 1937:
The Good Earth
(codirected with Sam Wood, George Hill, Fred Niblo, and Andrew Marton). 1957:
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
.

From 1914, Franklin and his brother, Chester, codirected comedy shorts, films for children, and several Norma Talmadge pictures. In his twenty-year career as a solo director, Franklin worked with most of the leading actresses of the period in placid romances: Mary Pickford in
Heart o’ the Hills
and
The Hoodlum;
Norma Talmadge in
Smilin’ Through;
Constance Talmadge in
East Is West, The Primitive Lover, Dulcy, Her Night of Romance, Learning to Love, Her Sister from Paris, The Duchess of Buffalo, Beverly of Graustark
, and
Quality Street
. His polite and meretricious handling of the ladies brought him to Irving Thalberg’s attention and in 1928 he joined MGM to direct Norma Shearer in
The Actress
(based on Pinero’s
Trelawney of the Wells
). He worked with her again on
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
, and directed Garbo in
Wild Orchids
and Ruth Chatterton in
The Lady of Scandal
. As so often with Thalberg’s choices, Franklin was a colorless director. This comment from Clarence Brown may suggest the source of Franklin’s reputation: “Too good; he overemphasized goodness. He was beyond perfection in his work.” Such a paragon spent several years as a producer nursing
The Yearling
(46)—directed by Brown and fastidiously overbred.

Nevertheless, Franklin did duty on several major MGM films, directing Shearer in
Private Lives
and the inane
Barretts of Wimpole Street
, and struggling to make Paul Muni, Luise Rainer, and a million coffee-ground locusts interesting in
The Good Earth
. That was beyond his customary territory, and the necessary assistance of four others, as well as the death of his patron, Thalberg, may have persuaded him to abandon direction. He came back only in 1957—by some nostalgic quirk—to try again with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whereas he had made it earlier with a mogul’s lady, so the remake had Jennifer Jones on the sofa and Selznick in attendance.

As if to show his respect for Thalberg, Franklin became a producer of respectable dullness: respectful of conventional stars, tidy stories, and production values. His films glow with comforting assurances and cheerfully evade harshness. The war in
Mrs. Miniver
, for instance, is merely a threat to a bland American household; Greer Garson was the epitome of Franklin’s polite lady. He produced
On Borrowed Time
(39, Harold S. Bucquet);
Waterloo Bridge
(40, Mervyn Le Roy);
Mrs. Miniver
(42, William Wyler);
Random Harvest
(42, Le Roy);
Madame Curie
(43, Le Roy);
The White Cliffs of Dover
(44, Brown);
Homecoming
(48, Le Roy);
Command Decision
(49, Wood);
The Miniver Story
(50, H. C. Potter);
The Story of Three Loves
(53, Gottfried Reinhardt and Vincente Minnelli); and
Young Bess
(53, George Sidney).

In addition, he gets a solo credit on
Bambi
(42, David Hand), thanking him for his “inspired collaboration.”

Brendan Fraser
, b. Indianapolis, Indiana, 1968
In so many happy ways, Brendan Fraser is a throwback—to the days of such expert idiot comedy as Ralph Bellamy practiced, or even to the silent era. He has a face that registers hurt hopes and innocent optimism as easily as a child’s, and without a tremor of Method neurosis. In a cleverly arranged series of films, he has played a large, handsome, manly goof thrust out of his own time or against the grain of modern cynicism, and handling the tension with sweet good humor. He is a comedian of such confident understatement that, on
Gods and Monsters
(98, Bill Condon), Ian McKellen said that he was as occupied as he could be learning from Fraser’s rapport with the camera. It’s easy to see Fraser in gorgeous romance—less easy to see him in darkness, much less gloom. But he begins to show signs of tragic ambition.

His parents are Canadian, and the boy traveled widely in early life. He studied theatre at Cornish College in Seattle and made his debut in
Dogfight
(91, Nancy Savoca). In
Encino Man
(92, Les Mayfield), he was the Cro-Magnon who has to cope with modern suburban L.A. He was very good as the Jewish boy at the prep school in
School Ties
(92, Robert Mandel);
Younger and Younger
(93, Percy Adlon);
Twenty Bucks
(93, Keva Rosenfeld);
Airheads
(93, Michael Lehmann); a Harvard man in
With Honors
(94, Alek Keshishian);
The Scout
(94, Michael Ritchie);
Mrs. Winterbourne
(96, Richard Benjamin);
George of the Jungle
(97, Sam Weisman); gay in
Twilight of the Golds
(97, Ross Marks); as a young man in L.A. kept in a fallout shelter for thirty-five years in
Blast from the Past
(99, Hugh Wilson)—his funniest work yet.

His biggest hit came in
The Mummy
(99, Stephen Sommers), yet in truth he was rather wasted having to make worried faces at special effects. For Fraser is good enough to see the peril in real people.
Dudley Do-Right
(99, Wilson) cashed in on his stupid decency and cast him as the Mountie. He was the chump who deals with the devil (Elizabeth Hurley) in the remake of
Bedazzled
(00, Harold Ramis);
Monkeybone
(01, Henry Selick) was another good idea not worked out.
The Mummy Returns
(01, Sommers) didn’t even bother to disguise its being too much of a good thing.

It’s now that the beast awakes. In London, he played Brick on stage in a revival of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and in movies he attempted the Audie Murphy role (no joke) in
The Quiet American
(02, Phillip Noyce)—“God save us,” said the Michael Caine character, referring to him, “from the innocent and the good.” Well, generally, yes—but in Fraser’s case, I think not.

He had fun in
Looney Tunes: Back in Action
(03, Joe Dante), and serious in
Crash
(04, Paul Haggis). But does the public want him serious?
Journey to the End of the Night
(06, Eric Eason) hardly played.
The Last Time
(06, Michael Caleo);
The Air I Breathe
(07, Jieho Lee);
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(08, Eric Brevig);
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
(08, Rob Cohen);
Inkheart
(09, Iain Softley);
GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
(09, Sommers);
Extraordinary Measures
(10, Tom Vaughan).

Stephen Frears
, b. Leicester, England, 1941
1967:
The Burning
(s). 1971:
Gumshoe
. 1972:
A Day Out
(TV). 1973:
England Their England
(TV);
Match of the Day
(TV). 1974:
The Sisters
(TV). 1975:
Sunset Across the Bay
(TV);
Three Men in a Boat
(TV);
Daft as a Brush
(TV). 1976:
Play Things
(TV);
Early Struggles
(TV). 1977:
Eighteen Months to Balcombe Street
(TV);
Last Summer
(TV);
Able’s Will
(TV);
Black Christmas
(TV);
A Visit from Miss Protheroe
(TV). 1978:
Cold Harbour
(TV);
Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(TV);
Doris and Doreen
(TV);
Afternoon Off
(TV);
One Fine Day
(TV). 1979:
Bloody Kids
(TV);
Long Distance Information
(TV). 1981:
Going Gently
(TV). 1982:
Walter
(TV). 1983:
Walter and June
(TV);
Saigon—Year of the Cat
(TV). 1984:
The Hit
. 1985:
My Beautiful Laundrette
. 1986:
Song of Experience
. 1987:
Prick Up Your Ears; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
. 1988:
Dangerous Liaisons
. 1990:
The Grifters
. 1992:
Hero
. 1993:
The Snapper
. 1994:
A Personal History of British Cinema by Stephen Frears
(TV). 1996:
Mary Reilly; The Van
. 1998:
The Hi-Lo Country
. 2000:
High Fidelity; Fail Safe
(TV). 2001:
Liam
. 2002:
Dirty Pretty Things
. 2003:
The Deal
(TV). 2005:
Mrs. Henderson Presents;
2006:
The Queen
. 2009:
Chéri
. 2010:
Tamara Drewe
.

The above list is as full as I can discover, but it shows how far the young Frears was a product of television, most happy with the speed, economy, and function of that medium. Nothing is more central to Frears’s great achievement than that sense of natural modesty.

Late in the 1970s, writing in the admirable reference magazine
Film Dope
, Bob Baker said, “To put it plainly, ‘Cold Harbour’ was the best (i.e., the clearest, most moving, most resonant) film I saw in 1978. The same will very probably apply to ‘One Fine Day’ in 1979. I suppose one should wish for Frears to return to the big screen. Unfortunately there’s no guarantee—indeed, there’s the contrary—that he would find anything like the opportunities and relative freedom of expression that he has with television.”

Well, the opportunities have come. Almost casually, in 1985,
My Beautiful Laundrette
(made for TV) was promoted to the status of a festival movie with theatrical openings. Its ironic view of mixed races and mixed sex in a London under Mrs. Thatcher made for a hit. Then, after the Joe Orton biopic and the modern agitprop of
Sammy and Rosie
, Frears became an “A” list director in Hollywood. However, the results have been odd: to these eyes, the smart, brisk, sexy
Dangerous Liaisons
is a lot less interesting than Forman’s
Valmont
. Despite its fine acting,
The Grifters
seemed to derive from memories of film noir more than it grasped a real America or the Jim Thompson novel.
Hero
was, quite simply, a failure.