This is part one of a three part post about Franklin J Schaffner.  Part two deals with his most famous movies and is here.  Part three talks about his later successes and is here.

Franklin J. Schaffner

March 30^th was the Birthday of Franklin J Schaffner.  One of the reasons I wanted to write about him was that he has virtually disappeared from history.  There are no biographies of him and no current critical studies.  Yet he made a sizable contribution to movies.

Franklin Schaffner was an American movie director, who made some of the greatest films of the Sixties and Seventies.  This was all the more remarkable given the loss of identity that commercial cinema was then undergoing.

Franklin J Schaffner

Getting to the movies

Franklin Schaffner served in World War 2, in the US Navy. After the war, he drifted into television.  Through the fifties he became a a talented TV director, excelling at producing literate, exciting tv plays and movies in the demanding world of New York televison, with its tight budgets and even tighter schedules.  In this time he became an emmy-winning director and worked with Charlton Heston.  The two men became friends and colleagues and had the greatest of respect for each others skills.    

Alpha Male stories

 Franklin Schaffner’s best movies were about leaders, men of power and what they did with that power.  His readings of these men are close, uncompromising and perceptive.  His first big movie was the Warlord, with his friend Charlton Heston as a cold and deadly Norman knight.  Heston’s Chrystagon was a ruthless and cruel man, confident in his power.  Chrystagon relishes his power, which he justifies because he is a dutiful servant of the Duke of Ghent.  It is when he strays from the path of duty that his world becomes hostile.

Similarly in Planet of the Apes and Papillon, strong men strive for freedom with the entire world turned against them.  The fascination for Schaffner was in what these men could reach inside themselves and find, to keep them alive and to win out.   Probably his greatest movie is Patton, who was of course a truly great general in the real world.  Patton uses his power for the good of the free world, in a conflict that Franklin Schaffner himself risked his life in.  This gives him free rein to look at the consequences of decisions made by powerful men and how they manage those consequences.  At some point in all of these movies Schaffner makes the point that power gives men the chance to remake the world. 

No greater Alpha Male, Charlton Heston, Planet of the Apes

Here are some observations about his movies.

The Warlord

The first movie that really brought Franklin Schaffner to the public perception and proved that he could direct a major movie.  He was helped by a superb script/story and by the fact that his star was at the height of his popular appeal and took some real risks with the role.   

Sir Chrysagon De La Crux (Charlton Heston)

Charlton Heston is a poor Norman knight, Sir Chrisagon de la Crux. He arrives in a fiefdom on the Normandy coast, granted to him by his lord, the Duke of Ghent.  His job is rule the fiefdom and potect it from Friesian sea raiders (late medieval Vikings). He brings with him his cruel and arrogant younger brother Draco and his brutish and taciturn sergeant-at-arms, played by the very masculine Richard Boone.  Boone is superb as the scarred, implacable soldier and he steals every scene that he is in.  He is truly scary, monumental presence throughout the movie. 

It soon becomes apparent that the villagers Heston has been sent to protect are pagans, with a thin veneer of Christianity on top.  Nothing is what it seems, the heat and polluted marshes breed suspicion, fevers and foolishness.  Schaffnervery cleverly gets the landscape to do his work for him, using it to suggest chaos and evil.  Everything is dirty, the villager’s hovels are crooked and tumbledown.  The countryside is strange, trees are twisted into unnatural shapes, the streams are unclean.  Schaffner sets all of this up in a wonderful contrast with the Norman’s stone keep.  Their tower sits directly opposite all of this earthy chaos, clean, straight and strong.  Throughout the movie, Schaffner uses the tower to symbolise the antagonism between the rational and the wild.

THe Norman tower in The Warlord

The Normans are all Alpha males and look down on the dirty, ragged villagers.  Power and power-plays become ever more emotionally unhinged as the Normans rule the fiefdom.  Heston falls in love with a beautiful village girl and takes her on her wedding night in an act of Droit Du Seigneur.  The villagers rise up, invite the enemy Friesians to join them and lay siege to the tower.  The siege is exciting on every level, not least because Schaffner uses authentic medieval siege techniques to make it feel very real.  The ending is clever and very satisfying, marrying up Chrystagon’s new-found love with his duty to his Duke.                       

A superb movie, powerful, intelligent, provocative and very underappreciated.  

Part Two of this post is here