John FrankenheimerFilmography

Ambush

Crew: Director

Synopsis: When a driver-for-hire (Clive Owen) is confronted by hijackers, he must decide whether to surrender his passenger (Tomas Milian) or attempt to flee. The first of the five films in the BMW promotional series, Ambush was directed by action film veteran John Frankenheimer and written by Seven Read More

Reindeer Games

Crew: Director

Actors: Ben Affleck, Gary Sinise, Charlize Theron, Dennis Farina, James Frain

Synopsis: A burglar looking to make time with a beautiful woman after five years in prison falls into a dangerous trap in this action drama. Rudy (Ben Affleck) is serving time in prison for auto theft, where he becomes friendly with his cellmate Nick (James Frain). Nick has been enjoying a spicy courtship Read More

The General's Daughter

Actors: John Travolta, Madeleine Stowe, James Cromwell, Timothy Hutton, Leslie Stefanson, Daniel Von Bargen, Clarence Williams III, James Woods

Synopsis: A murder on a military base unearths a netherworld of corruption in this thriller based on the novel by Nelson DeMille. General Joe Campbell (James Cromwell) is a respected military leader with a flawless reputation; he's due to retire from the Army soon and is headed for a Vice-Presidential Read More

Ronin

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer directed this $20 million international action thriller from a screenplay by Richard Weisz (pseudonym for David Mamet) and J.D. Zeik. In Paris, Irish organizer Deidre (Natascha McElhone) assembles a team to grab a mysterious briefcase from criminals. They are never told who Read More

George Wallace

Crew: Director

Actors: Gary Sinise, Angelina Jolie

Synopsis: This biopic chronicles the colorful life of former three-time Alabama Governor George Wallace, an outspoken conservative whose views on segregation led to his being shot and permanently disabled, something that abruptly ended his attempt for the Presidency. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

The Island of Dr. Moreau

Crew: Director

Actors: Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk, Ron Perlman

Synopsis: On a remote tropical island, Dr. Moreau has appointed himself ruler over a menagerie of genetic mutants fashioned in his gene-splicing chamber of horrors. The products of his misguided attempt to create a more "pure" human species, the man-beasts worship Moreau as their god and "father" and live Read More

Andersonville

Crew: Director

Actors: Jarrod Emick, Frederic Forrest, Ted Marcoux, Tom Aldredge, Carmen Argenziano

Synopsis: Made for the TNT cable channel, this lengthy docudrama records the harrowing conditions at the Confederacy's most notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The drama unfolds through the eyes of a company of Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, VA, in June 1864, and shipped to the camp in Read More

Against the Wall

Crew: Director

Actors: Kyle MacLachlan, Samuel L. Jackson, Harry Dean Stanton, Clarence Williams III, Frederic Forrest

Synopsis: Made for cable TV, Against the Wall represents filmmaker John Frankenheimer's return to the small screen. This in-your-face reenactment of the 1971 Attica prison riots is jam-packed with political and sociological implications. Refreshingly, none of the participants -- the prisoners, the guards Read More

The Burning Season

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Raul Julia

Synopsis: This highly acclaimed made-for-cable movie tells the real-life story of one man's battle to save his land. Raul Julia stars as Chico Mendes, the Brazilian union leader who rallied his people to rise up and fight the exploitation of the rainforest. Mendes called on the locals to protest land Read More

Tales From the Crypt: Maniac at Large

Crew: Director

Year of the Gun

Crew: Director

Actors: Andrew McCarthy, Valeria Golino, Sharon Stone, John Pankow, Mattia Sbragia

Synopsis: In this thriller, American novelist David Raybourne (Andrew McCarthy) accidentally becomes entangled in the Red Brigade's terrorist plan to kidnap Italian Premier Aldo Moro during a research trip to Rome. As the terrorists attempt to kill David, he and his photojournalist friend (Sharon Stone) Read More

The Fourth War

Crew: Director

Actors: Roy Scheider, Jürgen Prochnow, Tim Reid, Lara Harris, Harry Dean Stanton

Synopsis: The Fourth War finds director John Frankenheimer delving into the same Cold-war territory he'd previously cultivated in films like The Manchurian Candidate. Col. Jack Knowles (Roy Scheider), serving at a faraway post on the German-Czech border, carries on a personal war with his Soviet Read More

Dead Bang

Crew: Director

Actors: Don Johnson, Penelope Ann Miller, William Forsythe, Bob Balaban, Frank Military

Synopsis: A police detective (Don Johnson), whose job is the only thing he has left in his life, must investigate the murder of a fellow officer. He follows the trail and is shocked to find a white-supremacist conspiracy in the process. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide Read More

Riviera

Crew: Director

Synopsis: In this drama, a former US agent attempt to rejoin society as he endeavors to reopen his deceased father's chateau. Soon he again finds himself surrounded by mystery and danger. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

52 Pick-Up

Crew: Director

Actors: Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret, Vanity, John Glover, Robert Trebor

Synopsis: Wealthy metallurgist Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) lives to regret his extramarital affair with pretty young Cini (Kelly Preston). A trio of vicious blackmailers (John Glover, Robert Trebor, Clarence Williams III) show Mitchell a videotape of his most recent roll in the sack with Cini. They demand Read More

The Holcroft Covenant

Crew: Director

Actors: Michael Caine, Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Lilli Palmer, Mario Adorf

Synopsis: Director John Frankenheimer and writers Edward Anhalt and George Axelrod try to inject some life into this adaptation of Robert Ludlum's best-selling espionage novel. Michael Caine stars as Noel Holcroft, who was adopted in Germany by an American family in the waning days of World War II. Now Read More

The Challenge

Crew: Director

Actors: Scott Glenn, Toshiro Mifune, Donna Kei Benz, Atsuo Nakamura, Calvin Jung

Synopsis: The Challenge is a classy effort directed by John Frankenheimer. Scott Glenn stars as an American boxer who finds himself in the middle of a Japanese blood feud. Toshiro Mifune and Atsuo Nakamura plays the last surviving brothers of an ancient samurai family, embroiled in a battle of the Read More

The Rainmaker

Crew: Director

Actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Tuesday Weld

Synopsis: Tommy Lee Jones stars in this TV-movie adaption of the popular play by N. Richard Nash. Tuesday Weld stars as Lizzie Curry, a plain farm woman who seems destined to spend her life alone. When her family farm is put in jeopardy by drought, along comes Bill Starbuck (Jones), a traveling rainmaker Read More

Prophecy

Crew: Director

Actors: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart, Victoria Racimo

Synopsis: This schlock horror classic from the 1970s is a product of the career ebb experienced by director John Frankenheimer. Robert Foxworth stars as Dr. Robert Verne, an inner-city physician renowned for his compassion and fairness. So he's asked by the EPA to mediate a dispute between Native American Read More

Black Sunday

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver, Steven Keats

Synopsis: Bruce Dern is ideally cast as Lander, a crazed Vietnam veteran, in Black Sunday. Lander joins terrorists Dahlia (Marthe Keller) and Fasil (Bekim Fehmu) in a plot to create a bloodbath at the annual Super Bowl. Piloting the ubiquitous Goodyear blimp, Lander is to ram the aircraft into the capacity Read More

The French Connection II

Crew: Director

Actors: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Bernard Fresson, Philippe Léotard, Jean-Pierre Castaldi, Ed Lauter

Synopsis: This sequel to the Oscar-winning The French Connection picks up almost exactly where the earlier film leaves off. Still on the trail of drug kingpin Frog One (Fernando Rey), narcotics officer "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) leaves his Manhattan stomping grounds and heads for Marseilles. There Read More

99 and 44/100 Percent Dead

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Harris, Edmond O'Brien, Bradford Dillman, Ann Turkel, Constance Ford

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer's bizarre, satirical gangster film is not for all tastes but has acquired a minor cult following. Elderly mobster Edmond O'Brien hires a hitman (Richard Harris) to eliminate his rival (Bradford Dillman) in a dystopic setting of not-quite reality. There are albino alligators Read More

Impossible Object

Crew: Director

Actors: Alan Bates, Dominique Sanda, Evans Evans, Lea Massari, Michel Auclair

Synopsis: Story of a Love Story may well be the least-known of John Frankenheimer's films. Filmed in France, the story concerns highly imaginative author Alan Bates. Though happily married, Bates enters into an affair with Dominique Sanda. Somehow, the whole experience seems unreal. Could Sanda be merely a Read More

The Iceman Cometh

Crew: Director

Actors: Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Fredric March, Jeff Bridges

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer's screen version of Eugene O'Neill's 1947 Broadway play The Iceman Cometh is set in 1912 at Harry Hope's dingy waterfront saloon. On the occasion of Hope's birthday, several derelicts enter the scene to pontificate on the lives they'd planned, the lives they still dream about Read More

I Walk the Line

Crew: Director

Actors: Gregory Peck, Tuesday Weld, Estelle Parsons, Ralph Meeker, Lonny Chapman

Synopsis: In this collaboration between actor Gregory Peck and director John Frankenheimer, Peck plays Southern sheriff Henry Tawes, who intends to bring moonshiner Carl McCain (Ralph Meeker) to justice. Instead, Tawes falls in love with McCain's nubile daughter, Alma (Tuesday Weld), and arranges for the Read More

The Horsemen

Crew: Director

Actors: Aziz Resh, Sy Temple, Omar Sharif, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jack Palance, Peter Jeffrey

Synopsis: Director John Frankenheimer, extrapolating from his earlier films The Gypsy Moths and Grand Prix, examines machismo and how men test themselves to the limits of endurance in The Horsemen. The film takes place in modern day Afghanistan. Uraz (Omar Sharif), the son of Tursen (Jack Palance), the Read More

The Extraordinary Seaman

Crew: Director

Actors: David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda, Mickey Rooney, Jack Carter

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer directed this tepid World War II comedy set in the Philippines. When four American soldiers -- Lieutenant Morton Krim (Alan Alda), Cook 3rd Class W.J. Oglethorpe (Mickey Rooney), Gunner's Mate Orville Toole (Jack Carter), and Seaman 1st Class Lightfoot Star (Manu Tupou) -- are Read More

The Gypsy Moths

Crew: Director

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Gene Hackman, Scott Wilson

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer directed this low-key drama about three men who stage a sky-diving thrill show and what happens when they roll into a small town in Kansas. Mike Rettig (Burt Lancaster) is the oldest of the group and more than a bit jaded; Joe Browdy (Gene Hackman) is the fast-talking MC who Read More

The Fixer

Crew: Director

Actors: Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Hugh Griffith, Elizabeth Hartman

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer directed this intense film adaptation of the Bernard Malamud novel. During the days of Czarist Russia, a poor but educated Jew, Yakov Bok (Alan Bates) is abandoned by his wife Raisl (Carol White). Yakov decides to leave his small village and travel to Kiev. Since it is the time Read More

Seconds

Crew: Director

Actors: Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey

Synopsis: Arthur Hamilton ({$John Randolph) is a listless Manhattan businessman who lives with his wife in the New York suburbs. One day, he runs into an old friend (Murray Hamilton) whom he thought had died. The friend leads him to The Company, a secretive operation run by The Old Man (Will Geer). The Read More

Grand Prix

Crew: Director

Actors: James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune, Brian Bedford

Synopsis: There's a few million dollars' worth of star power and a nickel's worth of plot in the lavish race-car melodrama Grand Prix. Among the participants in this annual cross-continent competition are characters played by James Garner, Yves Montand, Brian Bedford, and Antonio Sabato. Interested parties Read More

The Train

Crew: Director

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, Michel Simon, Suzanne Flon

Synopsis: John Frankenheimer directs Burt Lancaster in the tense spy thriller The Train. Lancaster plays Labiche, a French railway inspector. Allied forces are threatening to liberate Paris, so Col. Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) is ordered to move the priceless works of art from the Jeu de Paume Museum Read More

Seven Days in May

Crew: Director

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien

Synopsis: Adapted by Rod Serling from the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Seven Days in May was allegedly inspired by the far-right ramblings of one General Edwin Walker. Burt Lancaster plays General James M. Scott, who, convinced that liberal President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March Read More

The Manchurian Candidate

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Henry Silva

Synopsis: An unusually tense and intelligent political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate was a film far ahead of its time. Its themes of thought control, political assassination, and multinational conspiracy were hardly common currency in 1962, and while its outlook is sometimes informed by Cold War Read More

Birdman of Alcatraz

Crew: Director

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter, Neville Brand, Betty Field, Telly Savalas

Synopsis: In this film based on a true story, Burt Lancaster plays Robert Stroud, a withdrawn prison inmate who cures a sick bird that flies into his cell and eventually becomes a world-renowned ornithologist -- all while serving a life sentence. An overbearing warden (Karl Malden) eventually transfers Read More

All Fall Down

Crew: Director

Actors: Eva Marie Saint, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, Angela Lansbury, Brandon de Wilde

Synopsis: In one of his first roles, Warren Beatty plays a callous, self-involved young man who is idolized by his younger brother Brandon DeWilde. When Beatty and DeWilde's parents Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury take in Eva Marie Saint as a boarder, Beatty makes violent love to the poor (but not entirely Read More

The Young Savages

Crew: Director

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Shelley Winters, Edward Andrews, Larry Gates, Vivian Nathan

Synopsis: The Young Savages is what used to be called a "thinking man's picture" about a potentially lurid subject: urban juvenile delinquency. A blind Puerto Rican boy is knifed to death in Spanish Harlem, and three teenage gang members are accused of the crime. Politically ambitious assistant DA Burt Lancaster Read More

Ford Startime: The Turn of the Screw

Crew: Director

Playhouse 90: Days of Wine and Roses

Crew: Director

Synopsis: The devastating effects of alcoholism provide the basis for this episode of the Playhouse 90 television series. The tale centers on an ambitious young executive and his wife. Heavy drinking seems to be a mandatory part of their hectic social schedule and this takes them on a disastrous ride to the Read More

Playhouse 90: Winter Dreams

Crew: Director

Actors: Dana Wynter, John Cassavetes, Mildred Dunnock, Joseph Sweeney, Darryl Hickman

Synopsis: F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Winter Dreams" is brought to life in this 1957 Playhouse 90 presentation. John Cassavetes stars as Dexter Green, who has spent most of his life trying to fulfill the ambitions and hopes of his socially ambitious mother and his conservative father. Thanks to his Read More

Playhouse 90: The Fabulous Irishman

Crew: Director

Actors: Art Carney, Katherine Bard, Michael Higgins, Charles Davis, Eli Mintz

Synopsis: In his second Playhouse 90 appearance of the 1956-57 season, Art Crney stars as Robert Briscoe, the colorful, controversial Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ireland. Although of Jewish parentage, Briscoe was "accepted" as a Hibernian through and through on the strength of his fearless patriotism during the Read More

The Young Stranger

Crew: Director

Actors: James MacArthur, Kim Hunter, James Daly, James Gregory, Whit Bissell

Synopsis: Adapting a made-for-TV play that he had directed for the screen, John Frankenheimer made his feature film debut with this sensitive father-son drama. Tom Ditmar (James Daly) is a movie studio executive who has a strained relationship with his teenaged son Hal (James MacArthur). Hal is arrested Read More

Playhouse 90: The Comedian

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Rod Serling wasn't telling whom he based the leading character of his TV play The Comedian upon, but sharp-eyed viewers could detect traces of everyone from Milton Berle to Red Buttons. Mickey Rooney stars as a top-rated television comedian who is all love-and-kisses when before the cameras but a Read More

Playhouse 90: Rendezvous in Black

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Cornell Woolrich, whose written works have served as the basis for many an Alfred Hitchcock production, was the author of this Playhouse 90 drama. After arranging to meet his fiancee at a busy downtown street corner, a young man arrives at the appointed destination--only to find that the girl is Read More

Playhouse 90: Eloise

Crew: Director

Synopsis: This highly anticipated and lavishly publicized semi-musical TV adaptation of Kay Thompson's "Eloise" stories stars 7-year-old Evelyn Rudie as the titular 6-year-old heroine. As devotees of the books written by Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight already know, Eloise is a precocious little Read More

Playhouse 90: The Family Nobody Wanted

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Adapted from the autobiography of Helen Doss, this 90-minute TV version of The Family Nobody Wanted stars Nanette Fabray as Helen and Lew Ayres as her clergyman husband, Carl Doss. Unable to have children of their own, Helen and Carl contact virtually every adoption agency in the country, only to Read More

Playhouse 90: Heritage of Anger

Crew: Director

Synopsis: The seventh live presentation of the CBS drama anthology Playhouse 90 was "Heritage of Anger", written especially for television by Harold Jack Bloom. Ralph Bellamy heads the cast, as ruthless millionaire industrialist Eddie Hannemann. Naturally expecting his two sons to follow in his footsteps Read More