"Sinatra is a noir sound, like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire and the quiet weeping of women in the background." �" Film historian David Thomson, in The Biographical Dictionary of Film .
Even though Frank Sinatra has long been on our collective soundtrack, it's difficult to believe he would have turned 100 this year. He's best remembered for his vocal style and singular phrasing, a masculine, cocky yet cool after-hours persona that men wanted to emulate and turned women on, as well as for his womanizing and a volatile, alcohol-soaked affair with Ava Gardner, in whom he met his match. But Sinatra had a simultaneous and substantive, though considerably less lauded 25-year film career in Hollywood, where he worked with some top-flight directors.
Judging from his filmography, he was a very busy guy, but critics have not always been kind in their assessment of the Sinatra canon. Although Thomson credits Sinatra as a "pervasive influence on American acting" and with glamorizing the "fatalistic outsider," he also writes, "The surly charm of the runt's ugliness made him too broody, too lazy, or too bored to pick films carefully or attend to them with due seriousness. The extraordinary flair for the dramatic ballads and complete assurance [he had] with a live audience have all-too-seldom shown themselves on the screen."
But on Friday, set those reservations aside, sidle up to the bar, and raise a glass of Jack Daniels to Ol' Blue Eyes at the opening night of Ring-a-Ding-Ding: The Movies of Frank Sinatra, a weekend program of 11 films at the Vogue Theater, Aug. 21-23. Come to think of it, getting a little soused might put one in exactly the right frame of mind for the after-party chaser, a screening of Ocean's Eleven. For those of a younger vintage weaned on Steve Soderbergh's sleek remake and sequels with their pampered stars, this 1960 movie, starring Sinatra as the charismatic Danny Ocean, is the origin story, the big daddy of them all. Ocean, an ex-con and man's man, orchestrates a series of impossible Vegas casino heists that unfold on New Year's Eve with the assistance of 11 of his WWII buddies, including Rat Pack "bros" Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.; Angie Dickinson, the token gal pal, is there by virtue of her then-famous legs.
That lighthearted comic caper shares a double bill with Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953), Sinatra's first serious dramatic role and one for which he took home a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. In this adaptation of the James Jones novel, Sinatra plays an n'er-do-well junior army officer stationed in Hawaii in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. It was rumored that in order to land the part, Sinatra called on his mob connections, much as the down-on-his-luck crooner did in The Godfather, though it's unlikely that a bloody racehorse's head ended up between the sheets of a Hollywood producer's bed. The urban legend would explain, however, how a relative novice was cast alongside big stars like Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. Made during a period of personal upheaval, his recording career and disastrous marriage to Gardner tanking, the film raised his stock and allowed him greater freedom to mix it up between dramas and the musicals that were a natural fit.
In the San Francisco-set Pal Joey (1957), for instance, he's a musically-inclined cad �" not a stretch �" whom Rita Hayworth, a wealthy high-society type with a big bankroll, and Kim Novak, a naive showgirl with standards, if there is such a thing, fight over. It has some terrific, memorable songs from the Rodgers & Hart Broadway show to recommend it, notably "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "The Lady is a Tramp" and "My Funny Valentine."
Shot on location in New York City, the Arthur Freed-produced MGM musical On the Town (1949) features wunderkinds Stanley Donen and choreographer/co-director/star Gene Kelly at the helm of a story about rambunctious singing and dancing sailors �" Sinatra trying to keep up, and Jules Munshin �" on 24-hour shore leave. A few years later Sinatra appeared as the hustling gambler Nathan Detroit in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Guys and Dolls (1955), where his singing of Frank Loesser's score is infinitely better than that of his co-star, Marlon Brando. All three of the above, plus Anchors Aweigh, will be screened on Saturday.
The event wraps with darker works, such as John Frankenheimer's cold-war paranoia, commie-conspiracy thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Sinatra fully invests himself in the role of an intelligence officer and captain of a platoon who might have been brainwashed during the Korean War; after returning Stateside, he dreams of murder and begins to unravel. Based on the Richard Condon novel, the film also stars Laurence Harvey as an unwitting assassin and Angela Lansbury as the mother from hell. And, in one of his strongest, most realistic and least glamorous performances, Sinatra shed his nonchalant toughness and vanity to portray a tortured musician who descends into heroin addiction and emerges from a harrowing recovery in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Happy 100th, Frank!
Aug. 21-23 at the Vogue Theater. Info: cinemasf.com/vogue.