John Frankenheimer

The Manchurian Candidate

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A sweaty, brainwashed Raymond Shaw

Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s superbly chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments. The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been … Read more

Seconds

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Tony with a picture of his former self

John Frankenheimer’s Seconds could almost serve as an emotional template for Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, made two years later in 1968, though Frankenheimer is working in black and white and brings much more of the live TV aesthetic to bear on his cool, highly influential horror movie – Face/Off, Total Recall and The Wicker Man also owe it a debt, and both Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho are big fans. Seconds is the third, confusingly, in Frankenheimer’s so-called Paranoia Trilogy (after 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate and 1964’s Seven Days in May) and its Saul Bass opening titles neatly sum up what’s to come – distorted giant faces in extreme close-up fill the screen … Read more