John Frankenheimer, gone

This is just depressing. Moriarty, over at Aint-It-Cool-News, does an excellent obituary:

...Frankenheimer had a long and important career as a filmmaker, and leaves a filmography that should make most young filmmakers today tremble in awe. This is the guy who directed BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY and THE TRAIN and SECONDS. Any one of those movies would be enough to cement his name, but to have essentially directed them back to back to back is staggering.

Every one of those is a memorable film. "The Manuchurian Candidate" and "Seven Days in May" illustrate how to make a political thriller without the need to condemn one party over another (a la "The American President" and "The Contender"). And I can't watch "The Train" enough, as much as for Frankenheimer's direction as Burt Lancaster's extraordinary work.

The beauty of film, of course, is that the work lives on (assuming we can properly store the damn things, curse the penny-pinching bastards who put so much work at risk, but that's a rant for another time). If you don't own a Frankenheimer film, skip on down to the video store and rent one or four.