Review of Fearless Frank

I saw this on local independent TV as a kiddie matinée movie in the late 60s/early 70s and was weirded out by the psychedelic and darker elements. The villains are as strange as anything in a Dick Tracy comic, and Jon Voight has a precursor role to his Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy, as a painfully naive hick who comes to the big city (this time Chicago) only to have his life thrown into turmoil. MGM HD showed this not too long ago and I got to see it again. This time I was taken with the supporting cast, many of whom were members of the early second city - especially Severn Darden and David Steinberg, plus appearances by author Nelson Algren and voice genius Ken Nordine. I was also surprised to find out that it was written and directed by Philip Kaufman, but most of that information is available though the standard IMDb info. The film looks almost like an attempt to copy the camp feel of Batman, but it is much darker, and as can be expected with anything featuring the aforementioned Darden, Nordine and Algren, also pushes into intellectual satire. ** SPOILER ALERT ** As a kid watching it, I was disturbed that the hero wound up becoming a villain, and that the villains started to become heroic (False Frank) although it now feels fairly quaint. That it wound up on a holiday kid's matinée I guess was due to a programmer thinking since it was a goofy super hero comedy, it was kid friendly. It really isn't. Death, disfigurement and a strange moral make it more of an IFC than Disney Channel film.