Frankie Goes to Hollywood
🎙Retrofit Drive In
Frank Sinatra, aka the Voice, aka “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” spent a lot of time in LaLa Land, but how often do you get to swing with a title like that, baby? This week we catch up with Frankie in 1954 and 1955, right after he bagged the Oscar for his on screen death as Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953). The king of the bobby soxers was turning 40, and there were those who had said he was all washed up. A Clyde. A has been. But Frankie had the inside track.
The Oscar was the beginning of a phenomenal comeback, but the Chairman of the Board didn’t like hearing that particular word. That word irritated Frankie, and if someone said it even casually he might have to pop them in the mouth, like he did Mel Tormé’s publicist Jim Byron at the Crescendo club on Sunset just before Christmas, 1954. Poor Jim, so excited the celebrity party had come to hear his client, referred to six-month-pregnant Judy Garland as “a broad.” Poor guy had to hide in a phone booth.
“Get out of there, you bastard. Get out of there. What business is it of yours who we’re with? You fucking parasite. You’re nothing but a leech. You’re a newspaperman. I hate cops and I hate reporters. Get out of there right now and take off your fucking glasses. Why don’t you go out and make a decent living and not suck off other people? You leech.” --Frank Sinatra His Way:T he Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra (1986) by Kitty Kelley
Sure, our boy could get a little hot under the collar. He was under pressure. His marriage to Ava Gardner had more rocks than a month’s worth of Jack Daniels. On the other hand he was the most popular vocalist of the year 1954, according to Downbeat magazine. He was also nailing down $50 grand a week (2021 equivalent: $508,488) for singing in saloons. You know, swanky nightclubs.
He was heartbroken over Ava and pissed that Marlon Brando, who he referred to as “Mumbles,” got the role he craved in On the Waterfront.
But the future Rat Pack leader was no slouch. He was in the second of a seven-year contract with Capitol Records, and in 1954-55 he made more movies than anybody else in Hollywood: Suddenly, Young at Heart, Not as a Stranger, The Tender Trap, Guys and Dolls, and The Man With the Golden Arm.
This week we check out those bookends, two serious roles. No singing, no dancing, but some of the most honest acting of Sinatra’s career.
Suddenly (1954) is a strange but profoundly historic motion picture that was out of the public eye for a few generations. Sinatra plays a deranged war hero who has been paid a half million dollar to assassinate the President of the United States. To pull it off, he picks a house on a hill for his perch and takes it over in a home invasion.
It’s not a great movie, but the would-be shooter is fabulous. It is 1954, so audiences did not view everything with the idea that the worst that could happen probably would. There’s even a quick history lesson in the dialogue, all about previous assassinations and the losers who pulled them.
The film has an odd, hokey look to it, almost like a 1950s educational film. It isn’t well known, even to the most rabid Sinatra fans. It was not shown for years after the star learned Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it a few days before Nov. 22, 1963. He put in a call to Universal, and Suddenly was pulled off of the market. No re-releases, no TV, no future tape deals. DOA.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) is another edgy choice. Sinatra as Frankie “Dealer” Machine, should have probably won the Oscar for this one too. In one of those classic Sinatra ironies of being bigger than life, the gold statue went to Ernest Borgnine. That’s the same gorilla who beat poor Maggio to death in Eternity two years before. What are the odds?
In this movie he’s a good guy with a nasty habit. He comes home to a rough Chicago neighborhood after kicking heroin in prison. He’s trying to stay clean, he wants to be a jazz drummer. That’s why his arm is “golden,” not for the amount of drugs he has put in it. But it is a tough monkey that has attached to his back. Sinatra puts all his pain and fear into the withdrawal scenes. Where so much of his surroundings are dated and out of style, heroin stories are the same. They never have a happy ending.
Attempting a presidential assassination during a home invasion, kicking smack and poverty all at once, riding out a high profile divorce, singing with Brando, fighting with Borgnine, singing out on the albums Songs for Young Lovers (1954), Swing Easy (1954), and In the Wee Small Hours (1955)...all of it was part of the early 50s whirlwind that was reaped by Francis Albert Sinatra.
But we’ll always have Vegas!
Feature: SUDDENLY (1954)
Feature: THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955)
Cartoon: RHAPSODY IN PEW / ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
A great one...