Fearless Frank (1969)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Fearless Frank is a genuinely odd early work by Philip Kaufman, featuring an early performance by Jon Voight as a flawed superhero. It attempts to recreate the feel and atmosphere of a comic book, particularly in its first half. Ultimately, it is a mixed bag that will have difficulty appealing either to children or to fans of experimental film.If you watch only the first half hour, Fearless Frank appears to be intended as a children's film. The characters seem straight out of a Dick Tracy comic, complete with bizarrely disfigured criminals. There is a definite camp element to this section of the film, with comic narration provided by a mysterious, and melodramatic, on screen narrator with a typewriter. Similarly, a scientist's patented evil detector gives the proceedings the feel of a sixties children's matinée. Only the plot line, which revolves around a young farm boy resurrected from the dead to become a superhero suggests anythingHowever, the film gets increasingly odd as it goes along. A clone of the hero is introduced, and the plot shifts from a straight superhero story to one of a character corrupted by success. From here the film becomes increasingly surreal and inaccessible. In the end, it becomes more of a film for Kaufman completists than a film one would watch for enjoyment.

i LOVE this movie. I LOVE it! i saw it in the 1980s, which contradicts other reviewers info here. but i saw it, not in the movie theaters and not on television, but in film school. the school of visual arts had the foresight at that time, to show and old film, at that time, to a bunch of lunatic film students and everyone cheered and went nuts. now, this film isn't for everyone. and i don't think i'm better or worse than anyone else who's seen this. but we'd been trained to recognize "camp" and "campy" production values for their own sake. this's a spirited romp. with an ultimately downbeat message. voight is great. monique van vooren is wonderful (always wonderful to see an underrated actress used so well) and the oddball cameos are... odd. the improvised dialog (hell, improvised shooting in chi-town) make this a must-see for fans of casavettes. think "shadows", comically unhinged. yeah, it's amateurish at times. yeah, those holes show right through. but watch this either in your 'teens or twenties, or if you can't do that, stoned might help. or if you have a non-uptight sense of the daring and outlandish, this should work for you. if you're looking for seamless, state of the art, same-ness by today's eyeball knockout special effects standards, don't even bother. you just won't get it and end up being angry for your wasted time. otherwise, check it out!

I used to review movies years ago and have seen hundreds of films. This movie is full of double, triple and multiple-exposed images of Jon Voight as a Superman clone and was so bad we watched it twice on late night TV because we couldn't believe how bad it was.Voight plays a country bumpkin who goes to the city, gets killed and is revived by a mad scientist into a Superman-like hero who becomes psychotic. The scientist develops a clone of the hero and they fight it out in the skies over St. Louis.It's NOT in the list of credits usually listed for Jon Voight. It was his first film.

I loved the cartoonish aspect of the movie. Jon Voight was excellent and showed great comic flair. The movie Mystery Men reminds me of FF. I saw it as a kid and thought that it was coolest movie I had ever seen, but that was over 30 years ago. I would love to see it again.