Knowing that Philip Kaufman directed movies like "The Right Stuff", it blows the mind that he once directed the cornball "Fearless Frank". Jon Voight plays a drifter who gets murdered and then reanimated as a superhero. With cartoonish action and speech that sounds like a recording of a recording, it's impossible not to laugh at this. It's going to be hard to find a copy, though. I suspect that Kaufman's too embarrassed about this movie to release it.As for the rest of the cast, Monique van Vooren apparently is best known for appearances in Andy Warhol movies. Severn Darden was a character actor over a number of years (I best remember him from "The President's Analyst" and "Saturday the 14th"). Nelson Algren (Needles) was the author of "The Man with the Golden Arm", and Ken Nordine (the narrator) was a jazz vocalist.

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 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.

This movie was a breath of fresh air after watching too many formulaic Hollywood clones. Campy, clever and novel this gave me a new appreciation for Jon Voight. It was decidedly low budget, like a film school project but the director worked around this in humorous ways. Some cliche villains made this like reading a children's story, but with a wicked grin and a wink. It reminded me of performance art my college roommate used to do that kept us up laughing until all hours of the night. This movie single-handedly convinced me not to cancel my subscription to Showtime, because I never would have watched it if it wasn't coming on at the same time I was channel surfing, but I'm so glad I caught it and would recommend it to anyone who is sick of seeing the same soulless big-budget movie over and over with different titles.