One word says it all: Frank. He's a legend, an institution,
a totally monstered-out guy with legs that won't quit. On record,
on film, in person -- 50 years into his career, and still he's
the talk of the town. True, the talk is about did he or did he
not shtup the First Broad, but hey! At 75 you should be the topic
of such musings.
Frankie went To Hollywood in the Forties, but after few musicals
and From Here To Eternity and The Country Girl,
his career took a turn for the noir. He refined his acting style
from hot to cool and from that of an ingratiating boy crooner
into a man's man with an edgy on-camera personality that held
for years before descending into reptilian self-parody. If Steve
McQueen acted with the back of his neck, Frank acted with his
forehead -- in film after film, the truest part of Sinatra's performance
occurs at the confluence of the furrows in the center of his brow.
Here-
with a six-pack of Frank to go:
Suddenly
(5 hats)
The Cold War collides with Mob-fixated paranoia, and the future
Chairman of the Board anticipates Lee Harvey Oswald by nearly
ten years in a wiggy outing that sees him star as a gunsel being
paid $500,000 to assassinate a vacationing President.
Directed by Lewis Allen in the broad strokes of the day, this buried 1954 classic still yanks on the dorsal hairs. Sinatra, portraying a blood-crazed WWII vet who's got a German-made sniper rifle aimed for the presidential skull, says with a dreamy smirk, "I never killed a President before" -- rude stuff from a guy who'd wind up singing at one of JFK's inaugural balls.
And all you conspiracy theorists, pipe this: Suddenly was put together by an outfit called Libra Productions, as in Oswald's birthsign and the title of Don DeLillo's 1988 novelistic imaging of the assassin's life. Think about it, and check the locks on the back door before you turn out the light, as you will want to do after you've basked in the bughouse glow of Frank's nutty grin.
Von
Ryan's Express (4.5 hats)
One of the first revisionist WWII films, the 1965 VRE stars
Frank as a hard-case pilot whose P-38 Lightning -- the coolest
plane of all time -- is shot down in Italy at war's close. Interned
in a POW camp full of stiff-upper-lip Britishers, Sinatra outranks
everybody else. He irks the Brits but leads the troop in a train-borne
race for the Swiss border, along the way jamming a skewer through
the happy-band-of- brothers POW camp genre -- most notably when
he machineguns the only woman in the cast to keep her from blowing
the whistle.
As in all his other flicks, Frank runs like a man accustomed to riding in limosines, but VRE is worth the ride, if only to see Sinatra, in full Wehrmacht drag, barter wordlessly with a Gestapo weasel over his watch. Made when Frank was in his acting prime, VRE even has a score that lays down Nelson Riddle-style chord changes in the middle of a military march theme.
The
Man With The Golden Arm (4 hats)
Okay, okay. So it's a mite hokey, and shot on a backlot Chicago
where everybody is white and the glamorama nitery where Kim Novak
does something inscrutable is just across the street from her
tenement flat. And you can't figure out why Frank, as a recovering
junkie just back from a stint in
the big house, wouldn't snap to the reality that his osten-sibly
wheelchairbound wife can walk as well as any and better than most.
And it's tough to believe that a parole officer would recommend that a guy trying to kick the big H go straight by becoming a jazz musician -- or that a guy trying this unusual method would find a cure that takes in one dose, as the upbeat ending suggests. But Otto Preminger's 1955 version of Nelson Algren's novel swings hard, thanks to Frank's performance as the cardshark-cum-drummer-cum-addict. Watching him go cold turkey, you'd almost believe he'd had a taste.
Other pluses include an amazingly young Darren McGavin as a Mephistophelean smack dealer with a pencil-thin moustache and the much-mourned Arnold Stang as a Bilkoesque running buddy.
Manchurian
Candidate (3.5 hats)
Reversing field on the theme of Suddenly, this suppressed 1962
outing is positively Zen in some of its interchanges. Frank plays
yet another soldier, this time one of the boys in brown brainwashed
by the ChiComs during the Korean War. He's assigned to dog Laurence
Harvey, a fellow brainwashee, who works his way into sniping range
of a presidential candidate but instead eats the barrel himself.
Before he does, the film slithers through some Oedipal scenery chewing between Harvey and Angela Lansbury, as vampy a mom as ever pined for a poofy boy gone off to war, and features Frank in what may have been the first kung fu fight incorporated into a Hollywood film.
The Detective (3 hats)
With Frank at his Existential Man noirest, this NYPD policier
smells like a subway but gets you where you want to go: bumpy
ride, lots of grit in the air, occasional flashes of darkness,
and a grimly satisfying performance by Sinatra as a man with too
much on his mind and a wife whose body won't quit -- especially
when she's with another guy.
Tony Rome / Lady In Cement (1 hat) These two period pieces should be seen as a double feature on the VCR, so you can turn it off. Set in a Miami light years away from resurrection by Don Johnson and Michael Philip Thomas, these private eye procedurals star Frank as a thickbodied wiseass with unbeatable pheromones. At one point Raquel Welch is throwing her considerable self all over him; at another, a gay club manager comes on strong.
Tony and Cement both reek of late-Sixties establishment style -- there's not a foreign car in any shot, the soundtracks are twelfth-hand Brazil 66, and the mini--skirt/faggot jokes are dense and dumb. In tone, the Romes presage Kojak and Rockford Files, but without the wit. Frank delivers every line intended as funny in a weirdly mannered way, dousing the humor to death and taking his screen presence to a new plateau of dissociation. If you can stay awake through a pair of plots that give new meaning to the term "plodding" -- this flick's for you, Jack.
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