Savage Tales

The nexus of literature and film is where it’s at for me, so what better subject to spotlight today than The Young Savages (1961), which was based on a novel by Evan Hunter and directed by John Frankenheimer?  For those who don’t already know it, Frankenheimer was one of my heroes, whom I was lucky enough to interview for Filmfax and briefly befriend before his untimely death in 2002, the same awful year I lost my Dad and my eighteen-year-old first car.  I’ve often called him the directorial equivalent of Richard Matheson, because even though he made so many outstanding films—e.g., Seconds (1966), French Connection II (1975), Black Sunday (1977), Ronin (1998)—that they perversely canceled one another out when I finalized the B100, his name inspires naught but a blank stare among the general public.

A key transitional work, The Young Savages was Frankenheimer’s second feature; the first, The Young Stranger (1957), was based on his 1955 Climax! episode “Deal a Blow,” one of 152 live dramas that earned him six consecutive Emmy Award nominations during the Golden Age of television.  “I had never planned to stick with movies,” he told me.  “Doing the movie was an afterthought.  I’d already been set to do Playhouse 90 starting that following fall, and I didn’t really like motion pictures compared to television.”

“The only reason that I left live television, or taped television, was because CBS cancelled everything.  I loved doing that, and I was much happier in it than I was ever happy in movies.  Looking back on it, that period of live television was without doubt the highlight of my life.”  In 1962, however, he released a trifecta that put him at the top of the Hollywood heap:  All Fall Down, Birdman of Alcatraz, and The Manchurian Candidate.  Most important, The Young Savages was his first of five films with Burt Lancaster (Oscar-nominated for Birdman), more than any other director, followed by another Word-Man favorite, Robert Aldrich, with four.

Evan Hunter was no stranger to the setting (New York City), genre (crime fiction), or subject (juvenile delinquency) of his cleverly titled 1959 novel A Matter of Conviction.  As Ed McBain, he wrote the long-running 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals, set in a fictionalized Manhattan he called “Isola,” while under the Hunter byline he had penned the j.d. classic The Blackboard Jungle, memorably filmed by writer-director Richard Brooks in 1955.  In the novel, assistant D.A. Hank Bell (né Belani), assigned to prosecute three gang members for the murder of a blind Puerto Rican youth in his boyhood Harlem neighborhood, learns that the mother of one defendant, Danny, is Mary Di Pace (née O’Brien), who sent him a Dear John letter during World War II.

According to Lancaster’s biographer, Gary Fishgall, Hunter was hired to adapt his own work but replaced by Edward Anhalt, who recommended Frankenheimer after seeing his 1959 Playhouse 90 production of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.  An Academy Award-winner for Panic in the Streets (1950) and Becket (1964), Anhalt had a diverse resume, including John Sturges’s The Satan Bug (1965) and Hour of the Gun (1967), and was reunited with Frankenheimer on the 1985 adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant.  To rewrite Anhalt’s script during shooting, Frankenheimer engaged J.P. Miller, whose teleplay “Days of Wine and Roses” he had directed in 1958; losing the 1962 film version of that Playhouse 90 classic to Blake Edwards, as he had Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), was one of the biggest disappointments of his career.

Lancaster and Frankenheimer got off to an inauspicious start, attributed to the former’s reluctance to make The Young Savages:  due to debts incurred by his recently shuttered production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, it was the first of four films he was obliged to make for United Artists at a fraction of his usual fee.  Such was their rocky relationship that, as Frankenheimer related in his book-length interview with Charles Champlin, Lancaster et al. had to lure him back to L.A. on the pretext of fixing a last-minute problem with Savages to ask him to replace British director Charles Crichton on Birdman, a project Frankenheimer had hoped to do for television, but was denied permission by the Bureau of Prisons.  Similarly, after they had collaborated on Seven Days in May (1964), Frankenheimer supplanted Arthur Penn, who had been hired and fired as the director of The Train (1964), which—like Birdman—was also among Lancaster’s bargain-basement quartet.

Frankenheimer’s penchant for unusual camera angles is evident from the credit sequence, with its tense shots of Danny (Stanley Kristien) and his fellow Thunderbirds seeking and stabbing Roberto Escalante (Jose Perez), whose dark glasses reflect his murder.  Having persuaded executive producer Harold Hecht to use New York locations (also Lancaster’s home turf) and cast untrained street toughs as the Thunderbirds and their Puerto Rican rivals, the Horsemen, Frankenheimer hired Sydney Pollack—who had acted in several of his television productions—to coach them, which helped lead to his successful directing career.  Telly Savalas made his film debut as Detective Lt. Gunderson, Bell’s police ally, with Shelley Winters replacing Lee Grant as Mary shortly after shooting began; adding a reportedly uncomfortable verisimilitude, Winters was in fact Lancaster’s ex-lover and, according to Fishgall, his original choice for the role.

Cast as the new character of R. Daniel Cole, the D.A. whose gubernatorial ambitions cause him to demand the death sentence, was Edward Andrews (so effective in “Third from the Sun,” the Twilight Zone episode adapted by Frankenheimer’s frequent collaborator, Rod Serling, from Matheson’s story).  The film eliminates Bell’s friendship with the judge (Robert Burton), downplays his parental inattention toward his daughter, Jenny (Roberta Shore), and changes his wife, Karin (Dina Merrill), from a German he met during the war to a Vassar graduate who castigates Cole until she is terrified by two gang members in an elevator.  But the seemingly open-and-shut case is more complex:  far from being innocent, Roberto was a member of the Horsemen who concealed their zip guns after a rumble, while the lab report on the knives reveals in the climactic courtroom scenes that Danny only pretended to stab him because of peer pressure.

“I thought he was wonderful,” Frankenheimer said of Lancaster, whom he directed for the last time in The Gypsy Moths (1969).  “I thought he was dedicated, intelligent, he was the most professional human being I’ve ever known.  He demanded the best from everybody who worked with him and he gave the best.  He was a real movie star.  He knew what his place was in the overall scheme of things.  He had a wonderful sense of himself.  He was, I think, a very fine actor, and socially I think he accepted his responsibility as a human being.  He had a life that he could be very proud of.  I loved working with him…. I think all the films he did for me he was terrific in.  In Birdman of Alcatraz, he was extraordinary, but I think he was extraordinary in Seven Days in May and The Train, and I thought his performance in The Gypsy Moths was wonderful, and I loved him in The Young Savages.”