By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Jerrold Freedman, who helmed Kansas City Bomber, Borderline, and Native Son.
In the course of the Unsung Auteurs column, several reoccurring reasons for the under celebration of talent deserving of greater praise have emerged, with two streams particularly prevalent: namely, a lot of work being done in the field of television (see the likes of Lamont Johnson, Karen Arthur, Tom Gries, Paul Wendkos and many more), and a multifaceted career in which screen writing or directing is overshadowed by another creative pursuit, as evidenced by the likes of Jack Cardiff, Paul Newman, Tony Bill and Anthony Harvey. Jerrold Freedman’s opportunities for greater and more appropriate appraisal are thus stymied double fold, as his career is marked by both. Now retired from filmmaking and better known as an author of contemporary crime and legal fiction writing under the name of J.F Freedman, Jerrold Freedman was previously a prolific director of episodic TV and telemovies, as well as three strong feature films. Rarely discussed these days for his directorial work, we felt it was time to redress the balance for the very talented Jerrold Freedman.
Born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jerrold Freedman began his creative career as a producer of episodic television in the late sixties on shows like Prescription: Murder, Istanbul Express and Trial Run, where he was one of the first in the field to employ the young Spielberg. Freedman eventually moved into directing in 1970 on The Bold Ones, The Psychiatrist and Night Gallery, which eventually led to his feature directorial debut in 1972 with the exceptional drama Kansas City Bomber, toplined by superstar Raquel Welch. Tough and gritty, it showcased Freedman as a director of incredible promise.

Cruelly maligned and under-appreciated as anything but a sex symbol, Raquel Welch’s most affecting performance can be found in Kansas City Bomber, which on the surface just looks like a cheap cash-in on the early 1970s craze of roller derbies (almost like rock’n’roll wrestling on roller skates), but which underneath is a much darker, more serious affair. Directed with no-frills terseness by Freedman, this surprisingly bleak drama stars Welch as K.C Carr, a single mother (nine-year-old Jodie Foster plays her daughter) and roller derby star who gets traded from Kansas to Portland, where she is immediately hit with a clenched fist of problems: her teammates take an instant dislike to her; the team owner (Kevin McCarthy) is an ambitious creep who wants to get into her pants; and she’s struggling to make ends meet.
The film is a grim take on the world of professional sport, with athletes treated like cattle, and then thrown away when they’re of no more use; this is most horribly shown in the debasement of Horrible Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden), an aging “bad guy” player and one of K.C’s only friends on the team, who is thrown on the scrap heap with particular heartlessness. The role of K.C Carr is perfect for Welch: she still gets to look sexy while toning down the glamour, and is able to pour her always intense physicality into the role. Welch is earthy, believable and highly moving (especially in a scene when her young son refuses to speak to her because of what she does for a living), and delivers without doubt her finest performance. Though now largely forgotten, Kansas City Bomber is a rough-cut little gem, and it should have sent Jerrold Freedman off on a fascinating big screen career.

Instead, the director spent the decade on the small screen, where he helmed a collection of particularly strong telemovies, including 1973’s Blood Sport (written by Freedman and starring Gary Busey as a deeply conflicted high school football player), 1974’s The Last Angry Man (with Pat Hingle as a crusading doctor), 1978’s Lawman Without A Gun (written by Freedman and featuring Lou Gossett Jr as a 1960s civil rights activist running for sheriff against a segregationist), and 1980’s famous issue-of-the-week conversation starter The Boy Who Drank Too Much (headlined by Happy Days’ Scott Baio as a teenage alcoholic). Freedman returned to the big screen in 1980 with the rock-solid drama thriller Borderline, a lesser but highly enjoyable entry for action man Charles Bronson, who acquits himself very well as a tough but thoughtful US Border Patrol officer butting heads with people smugglers. Highly involving, well characterised (Freedman co-writes) and effectively performed (Ed Harris features in his first major screen role alongside Bruno Kirby and Wilford Brimley), this curiously prescient little flick disappointingly failed to make much of an impact despite its many positives.
After Borderline, Freedman returned to the small screen, where he delivered more quality work, including 1982’s Victims (a rape revenge drama with Kate Nelligan), 1983’s Legs (a dance drama with Sheree North), 1984’s The Seduction Of Gina (in which Valerie Bertinelli gets addicted to gambling, and to the game of blackjack in particular), and 1986’s especially enjoyable Thompson’s Last Run, which pits Robert Mitchum’s hardened crim against Wilford Brimley’s veteran cop. Freedman also directed the pilot episode of the classic 1980s TV show MacGyver, but had such an unpleasant time that he took his name off the project and took the infamous billing of Alan J. Smithee. Freedman returned to the big screen for his third and final film with the excellent Native Son, a cogent, highly intelligent and deeply disturbing adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel. A powerful dissection of race, politics and personal responsibility in 1940s Chicago, the film follows a young black man who is employed as a chauffeur by a wealthy white family and accidentally kills the daughter, leading to an ugly cover-up. Grim and unapologetic, Native Son is another example of Freedman’s gifts when it comes to handling difficult material. Freedman also showed a real facility for casting and working with actors, with an incredible cast featuring the likes of Matt Dillon, Elizabeth McGovern, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldine Page, Ving Rhames, Carroll Baker and Victor Love.

After more work in television, Freedman eventually left the director’s chair for good in the mid-1990s, choosing instead to concentrate full-time on writing fiction, which he’d already been doing on and off for some years. “Everyone seems to want to do two things in his life: direct movies and write a novel,” Freedman has said. “In 1987, I had been a successful film and television director and writer for fifteen years. I wrote and directed several feature films and TV pilots, including MacGyver and multiple episodes of The X-Files, and Kojak, to name a few, and I had even received Emmy nominations and Writer’s Guild of America television awards, but I wasn’t artistically satisfied, because of the compromises inherent in that business; only a handful of artists in film and television have creative autonomy.”
With highly successful books like Against The Wind (an absolutely cracking legal thriller which should have been adapted for the screen years ago), Key Witness, House Of Smoke, In My Dark Dreams, Above The Law and many more, Jerrold (now J.F) Freedman has certainly found the autonomy he craves…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.