Fearless Frank

Good titles, bad movie

There is not much written about Philip Kaufman's Fearless Frank because there is not much to write about. It is a feeble superhero parody that might have made a good fifteen minute Second City comedy troupe skit, but becomes tedious when expanded to the length of a feature flim. Kaufman adds Felliniesque digressions and vaguely narcotic curlicues as padding. Kaufman partisans would just as soon forget about the film, but since I've never championed his work, I will admit that I got a few laughs out of it; more than I laughed at After the Fox or The Producers.

The main reason for the laughs is the topnotch cast who tower over the thin material. A good chunk of the cast came from Chicago's aforementioned Second City. Second City's Severn Darden and Anthony Holland were in Kaufman's first film, Goldstein, and return for Fearless Frank. Fellow comic troupers Joan Darling and David Steinberg joins them for this one. All four would soon be familiar faces in Hollywood films and television. Jon Voight is the titular Frank, who is reanimated by mad scientist Darden into a superhero. All the leads do what they can with much scenery chewing and mugging. Nelson Algren, who also acted in Goldstein, appears as one of the bad guy's henchmen with the sobriquet, "Needles"; a tribute to Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm. Monique van Vooren appears as eye candy and Frank's dream girl, another character aptly named: Plethora. Cult musical figure Ken Nordine delivers droll narration.

Jon Voight

As one can surmise from this plot summary, Kaufman is borrowing a little from Mary Shelley, but the primary source of this parody is the then popular Batman TV series. This is most obvious when Kaufman punctuates Voight's defloration of Ms. Darling with mod titles of "Wham" and "Pow", but, alas, there is no "Biff". However, it is hard to parody something that already verged on self-parody. The film was first shown at Cannes in 1967 and, unsurprisingly attracted no interest. It was eventually released on a double bill with an obscure Dustin Hoffman B picture after the success of Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Kaufman got a deal with Universal Pictures which eventually released his next picture, the far superior Western, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Fearless Frank, at times looks good enough to be a Hollywood feature, but in some sequences, like a superimposed Frank flying over Chicago, it is strictly amateur hour. Kaufman never really evolved into a first rate visual stylist, but his next film would show a quantum leap. Too much of Fearless Frank's widescreen frame contains wasted negative space, meaningless visual clutter that distracts from the players.

I also feel the sophisticated Europhile Kaufman had a rather leaden feel for comedy. There are some amusing bits in ...Northfield and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he totally muffed Tom Wolfe's satiric jabs at Americana and the space program in The Right Stuff. I find that highly lauded film and his acclaimed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be gaseous, over long bores. I do like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Henry and June, and Quills. The White Dawn and The Wanderers are watchable and the rest is dross; including Fearless Frank.