There are a number of obvious reasons why the Film Society might choose to show Some Came Running at Wednesday night’s Frankly Celebrating: A Sinatra Salute, their tribute to Frank Sinatra’s career in Hollywood. Vincente Minnelli’s teeming CinemaScope melodrama turns 50 this year, and even if it wasn’t the best of Sinatra’s films (and in my mind, it is), Minnelli’s tendency towards stylistic overstatement provides the perfect contrapuntal showcase for his star’s non-actor naturalism. It also opens up multiple points of conversation, from the rise of the Rat Pack to Sinatra’s own complicated identity as a man’s man who got his start singing love songs to swooning girls.
But maybe most significantly, this story of a man torn between two selves and two classes, between striving for the mature manhood that would comfit his artistic aspirations and slumming in a permanent adolescence of bar brawls and disposable broads, also represents the beginning of the end of Sinatra’s own flirtations with acting artistry, his patience with the concept of cinema as art. In his Who The Hell’s In It chapter on Sinatra, Peter Bogdanovich notes that the star “has rarely been as focused or committed” as he is in Running, and in fact, with the exception of The Manchurian Candidate, Sinatra never seems so invested in actual acting ever again. A clear line can be drawn from the making of Running to what Tom Santopietro, in his just-released Sinatra in Hollywood, refers to as “the start of personality acting as opposed to acting on film as a craft.” Sinatra’s “personality acting,” his general lack of interest in using a film role as much beyond an extender of Frank Sinatra The Brand, would hit its peak with the Rat Pack movies, which ironically celebrate the capricious self-interest and casual misogyny that Some Came Running would seem to function as an object lesson against.
Running marked the first on-screen pairing of Sinatra and long-time friend Dean Martin, and though the depth and visual ingenuity of the finished project is worlds away from any of the Rat Pack films the friends would start to star in a couple of years later, that cinematic brand was undoubtedly inspired in part by their experience here. Sinatra had won an Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity which, like Running, was adapted from a James Jones novel; the second pairing of Sinatra with a Jones source was a calculated attempt to engineer lightning striking twice. Meanwhile, Martin was just a couple years off the break-up of Martin and Lewis and still cobbling together an identity as a solo screen star. On the set of Running, Sinatra and Martin’s relationship would mirror the partners in crime they played in the film, with Martin as slack support to Sinatra’s frustrated aggression.
Sinatra’s clashes on that set, set off by Minnelli’s “artsy” preoccupations and general fastidiousness, are well documented. While Minnelli spent hours calibrating set-ups to suit his perfectionism, a stand in substituted for Sinatra, who was never keen to rehearse or film more than one take even when working for a more business-like filmmaker. In what would become the model for off-time on the Rat Pack movie sets (if not the raison d’etre for making the films themselves), Sinatra, often joined by Martin, would while away the hours carousing with various invited guests — mostly gangsters, gamblers, women of ill repute. When the film started to run over-schedule, Sinatra famously ripped 20 pages out of the script and declared his refusal to film them. Finally, Minnelli decided after hours spent setting up the film’s carnival shoot-out climax that the Ferris wheel had to be moved three feet. As the story goes, upon hearing that shooting would be delayed, Sinatra and co-star Dean Martin walked off the Indiana set and flew to Los Angeles. After a “vacation” sanctioned by producer Sol Siegel, the actors returned to the set and powered through it, but to hear Santopietro tell it, Sinatra was never again willing to subjugate himself to the whims of a temperamental artist.
Santopietro’s limited (mis)reading of Some Came Running is colored by his obvious sympathy for his subject versus the fussy, high-minded Minnelli. But his chapter on the Rat Pack years is much more interesting in its critical assessment of Sinatra’s midlife run as poster boy for post-war extended adolescence. Wagging a finger at Sinatra and friends as “Peter Pan role models for the mid-twentieth-century American male,” Santopietro comments on the continuum the Rat Pack enjoyed (and which Sinatra, as producer of their films, could be credited with creating) between off-hours revelry and on-camera character:
Just take a look at footage of Frank, Dean and Sammy cutting up onstage in Vegas during the filming of Ocean’s Eleven: pratfalls, drinking, endless ribbing of each other–standard behavior … for fifteen year-old boys. The biggest stars in the world were indulging in any and every possible behavior in order to avoid the worst of all possible insults in the world of an adolescent male: “This is boring.”
As producer, Sinatra willfully positioned Ocean’s as a reaction against the artistic pretensions of directors like Minnelli, an appeal to populist escapism over stylized emotional realism. Santopietro quotes his defensive reaction to the many negative Ocean’s reviews: “We’re not setting out to make Hamlet. The idea is to hang out together, find fun with the broads and have a great time. We gotta make pictures that people enjoy seeing.”
Knowing that Sinatra’s career would so quickly hop on this track makes Running’s essential conflict seem that much more poignant. Early in the film, the father of icy, refined writing teacher Gwen French warns that Sinatra’s Dave Hirsh possesses an unusual “sensitivity,” which his daughter acknowledges by mentoring Dave’s writing but is reticent to engage on a personal level. Lovestruck, Dave is desperate for Gwen French to take him seriously as her equal, and he does what he can to mold himself into the kind of man that she might deign to marry — he quits drinking and gambling; he buys a decent suit; he stops hanging around with Shirley MacLaine’s cupie-girl ex-hooker. But “Teacher”, as he calls her, through some combination of fear, repression and class-based distaste, won’t let herself succumb to Dave’s advances. Shortly after he proposes marriage, Gwen angrily breaks away from his passionate kiss. “There’ll be no more of that!” she scolds, as if to remind him that such behavior is out of line for a pupil. Then, twisting the knife deeper, she makes it about class: “I’m not one of your barroom tarts!” At this, Sinatra slowly wipes his mouth, as if to brush off any trace of that kiss. “You’re right, teacher. I’ve been a bad boy. I’ve been naughty. As a matter of fact, I don’t belong in your class.” If Dave had control over his own destiny, he’d choose a life of restrained substance: books (reading them and writing them), true love, deep thoughts. But Gwen’s rejection robs him of that option, and so it’s a life of booze, cards, tarts, of being the aspirational figure for girls like Ginny in a social strata defined by gradations of sleaze.
So it’s interesting that Frank Sinatra, who certainly had control over his own destiny, choose to build a brand out of the stuff of Dave Hirsh’s sordid default. The Rat Pack ethos was so willfully devoid of the “sensitivity” attributed to the character, that potential blessing which sours into a curse, that it’s hard not to see the success of the Rat Pack as a brand (and especially Ocean’s Eleven as a film) as Frank’s massive **** you to all the Vincente Minnellis he’d ever had to suffer under. The Rat Pack movies play as if Sinatra and friends took the basest elements of the life that Dave was so eager to marry out of — drinking, gambling, fraternity with fellow (male) players, total antipathy to women — and funneled it into a decade-long propaganda stunt against sensitivity.
A Sinatra Salute, presented by Adrian Wootton, will offer an “
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth