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The Fixer's greatest star is unseen: Director John Frankenheimer. Mixing Chagallic lyricism and Hasidic irony, he has re-created a vanished, almost mythic time and place. Moreover, he has done it under theoretically impossible dramatic conditions. For well over half of the movie, the only event is Ya-kov's painful emergence. Like the hero, the viewer is kept in prison for what seems most of a lifetime, unable to turn away from the degradation on the screen. Like Yakov, he grows used to the pale illumination, the cramped quarters, the dreadful isolation. Toward the close, when the fixer steps briefly into the daylight, the sudden solar glare and the sight of crowds lining the streets have a visceral impact. Such summits give added credence to the growing reputation of one of the very few major American film makers.
Child of a Catholic-Jewish marriage, Frankenheimer, 38, has always been the splitting image of the bright boy who constantly wonders which way to turn. A precocious graduate of a liberal grammar school, a Catholic military school and Williams College, Frankenheimer began making films while in the military. In 1951, the Air Force decided to form a motion picture group in Burbank, Calif.; Frankenheimer signed on. "My director of photography was a guy named Kazumplick," he recalls. "The only meter he knew about was the one a cabbie pushed down. He had volunteered for the thing just to keep out of Korea."
From amateur nights in the Air Force, Frankenheimer moved on to professional evenings at CBS, where he provided some of early TV's finest hour-and-a-halves, including 7 he Turn of the Screw, Faulkner's Old Man and Days of Wine and Roses. Between TV shots he squeezed in his first film, The Young Stranger, then just missed being assigned to Breakfast at Tiffany's—"because," he claims, "Audrey Hepburn never heard of me." Very shortly, she did, along with everybody else. Frankenheimer, with Writer-Producer George Axelrod, raised $70,000 to buy the screen rights for The Manchurian Candidate. He paused, directed Bird Man of Alcatraz with Burt Lancaster and All Fall Down with Warren Beatty, and then turned Candidate into one of the cult films of the '60s. The movie was snubbed by many American critics, but it enjoyed a vogue in Britain and then came back to the U.S. for a reshowing and some enthusiastic reappraisals. With its meticulously planned scenario and adrenal climaxes, it established the vigorous Frankenheimer style. It also revealed the director's curious wavering between the frankly commercial and the experimental exploration of abnormal psychology. Bird Man is about a lifer in Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate about the making of a presidential assassin. His subsequent films show military tyranny (Seven Days in May), war horrors (The Train), Faustian science fiction (Seconds), the self-destructive drive in professional racers (Grand Prix). The Extraordinary Seamen, as yet unreleased, is a capricious satire on war. The Gypsy Moths, to be released next year, is about the personal and professional hang-ups of daredevil sky divers.