1964 - THE TRAIN, excellent action film from Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer

Usually considered one of the last black and white photographed action films, The Train is an exciting story with all of the action sequences staged with real trains and hardware. Amazingly, Burt Lancaster at 51 years old is still doing his own stunts.

Frankenheimer took over the direction of the film from Arthur Penn who Lancaster always something of a "director killer" had fired.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster had worked together before, so Frankenheimer knew what he was getting into.  Apparently the film was made with a lot of input from Lancaster who didn't have a problem throwing his power around on this production.

 

The Train was originally going to be a story about uneducated Frenchmen attempting to stop the Nazis from stealing the national art treasures of France.  Why would men who probably had never stepped in a museum even care about art?   Well we will never see that version of this film.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster reconfigured the script and turned it into an action epic and the action is pretty amazing.  Real trains crash into each other, a train yard is bombed, just incredible stuff.

 

 Lancaster and Frankenheimer put together an amazing cast of French actors, people who had been associated with filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Suzanne Flon Albert Rémy and Jeanne Moreau.  This is an impressive action film.

The credited screenplay is by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis and Walter Bernstein.  The runs 133 minutes.

1998 - RONIN, good action thriller

Probably a return to the glory days for director John Frankenheimer.  This is essentially an action thriller with decent dialog from uncredited writer David Mamet and lots of double and triple crosses that would make Alistair MacLean proud.

The film was well cast with Robert DeNIro and Jean Reno leading a team of for hire mercenaries who are after a mysterious suitcase which the IRA wants to get their hands on.  Frankenheimer had filmed Grand Prix the very long auto racing saga with a lot of skill during the racing scenes.  Ronin contains two very good car chases which Frankenheimer staged, he clearly knew a thing or two about filming speeding cars crashing into each other.

 

John Frankenheimer was one of the 1960's top directors but personal problems had derailed his career.  Ronin was a film that saw him more engaged than usual towards the end of his career after a string of fairly bad to mediocre films.

 The film was written by J.D. Zeik and David Mamet writing under the pseudo name of Richard Weisz.  Ronin runs 121 minutes.

1964 - SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, excellent political thriller

 The director John Frankenheimer at the top of his game.  This political thriller about an attempted coup by the United States military against a weak President is skillfully made. A lack of the usual tiresome action scenes is compensated by ramping up the suspense with excellent acting, camera work, and direction.

 

The film has a superb cast, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Frederic March, Martin Balsam, Edmund O'Brien, George Macready and Ava Gardner in the rather thankless role of the love interest.  I would be neglectful if I didn't mention a couple of favorite supporting actors, Whit Bissel,  Hugh Marlowe and Richard Anderson.

  

Rod Serling wrote the at times somewhat preachy screenplay,  the running time is 118 minutes. Kirk Douglas's company produced it.

1966 - GRAND PRIX, has extremely impressive racing sequences and not much else.

The lives and loves of Formula 1 race car drivers and their girlfriends/wives as they compete for the title of champion Grand Prix racer or something.

Grand Prix was directed by John Frankenheimer who filmed in 70mm.  Frankenheimer's team developed special camera mounts to attach to the Formula 1 cars with the actors actually in the cars zipping around the race tracks. When Grand Prix was released film critics were extremely impressed with the racing sequences.  However the soap opera plot that went on in between these sequences left these same critics extremely unimpressed. 

Watching this film 40 years later, it appears that the film critics at the time were pretty spot on about this film.  James Garner is the American driver trying to claw his way back to the top after losing a series of races.  Brian Bedford is a British driver who is recovering from an accident and has to use pain killers to get back in to the racing circuit.  Bedford's wife is played by Jessica Walter who doesn't want him to race any more, she demonstrates this by sleeping around with other drivers.  Some no name Italian actor Antonio Sabato is the cocky kid just asking for it  Finally there is French actor Yves Montand who played the old veteran who is starting to tire of the racing game.

Yves Montand is the conscious of the film as he blathers on about what it means to race and what racing means to the crowd.  In other words, Montand gets the absolute worst dialog in the film which makes him look like a shallow fool.  Montand has an affair with Eva Marie Saint who is a reporter for an an American magazine. Her role is to be the stand in for the audience as Montand explains the ins and outs of formula 1 racing which is essentially you get in a car and drive around the track really fast.

These personal stories are so bad and the dialog is so awful that it's very clear that Frankenheimer poured all of his energy into staging the racing sequences. 

Grand Prix is a film that wants to make auto racing into some kind of a grand statement about the need for men to test themselves under extreme conditions.  Frankenheimer never really pulls this theme off. 

The personal lives of the racers are just to stupid to care about. However the racing sequences which he filmed with his cinematographer Lionel Linden and visual consultant Saul Bass are spectacular to see especially on a widescreen TV since this film will never be shown in it's original 70 mm format.

179 minutes. Written by Robert Alan Arthur

2001, 2002 - THE HIRE, glorified, car commercials.

The marketing department at BMW got the brilliant idea to hire 8 top directors and have them shoot short films with the actor Clive Owen racing around in different model BMWs.

AMBUSH, by John Frankenheimer, a good car chase film.  Frankenheimer had directed Grand Prix and Ronin so he knew how to film exciting chases.

CHOSEN, by Ang Lee.  Also a fairly decent car chase film.  Probably the only interesting thing in it, Lee's little inside joke about The Hulk his big budget flop was the next film he directed.

THE FOLLOW, directed by the artsy fartsy Wong Kar-Wai, aims to be a mood piece but is just boring.

STAR, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring his then wife Madonna.  Madonna looks pretty bad and the film is about the driver embarrassing and humiliating her.  Almost prescient considering how Madonna and Ritchie's marriage ended.

POWDER KEG, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu wallows in it's stylization and pretentiousness, no fun.

HOSTAGE, directed by John Woo, only goes to prove that Woo should stick to filming scenes with Chow Yun-fat shooting thousands of bullets into guys instead of staging car chases.

TICKER, directed by Joe Carnahan, probably the best short film of the 2nd season, to bad Carnahan couldn't have brought this kind of interest to The A Team.

BEAT THE DEVIL, directed by Tony Scott.  The most annoying of all these short films, an attempt at a supernatural/ comedy/ action short film.  Filmed as usual by Scott like he had irritable bowel syndrome.

 Ambush and Ticker are probably the only two worth checking out.  This series is kicking around on YouTube.

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