Hot shot.
Finally saw the 1955 movie adaptation of the Nelson Algren's 1949 novel The Man With the Golden Arm (which won the National Book Award in 1950), thanks to Netflix. This is the one that "proved" that Frank Sinatra could act, dammit (that's him as Frankie Machine, below, desperate for a fix), and was the first Hollywood movie to take drug addiction -- specifically heroin (although it's never named) -- as its main theme.
It was decent -- better than I expected, actually, thanks largely to the supporting cast (particularly comedian Arnold Stang -- that's him in the cap and Coke bottle glasses, below, to the right of Sinatra -- and Darren "Kolchak, The Night Stalker" McGavin as the
silver-tongued pusher-cum-gambler Louie; Emile Meyer, so menacing in The Sweet Smell of Success, makes a welcome appearance as a police captain here) -- but it was still fairly draggy and staged in parts. Eleanor Parker's Zosh (rhymes with "Josh" in the movie, but it's probably supposed to be pronounced with a long "o," since it's short for "Sofia" or "Zofia"), Frankie's manipulative, smothering pill of a wife, was so irritating that she made me want to geez up, and no one in their right mind who's read as much of William S. Burroughs as I have would ever want to do that. I found myself longing for Richard Widmark's character from the 1947 noir classic Kiss of Death to show up to give Zosh a sleigh ride down the stairs of her tenement in her wheelchair.
Apparently the novel is set in the years immediately after WWII, when card dealer Frankie Machine returns to Chicago from the war with a Purple Heart and a morphine habit; the movie is intended to be set in the mid-1950s (check out Sinatra's scene with Kim Novak's Molly after he joins the musicians' union: they're window-shopping for the latest Detroit rolling stock and kitchen appointments, which clearly anchors the movie in the Eisenhower era, despite Sinatra saying, in another scene with Novak, that he'll drive the bobbysoxers wild: "bobbysoxers" being a historical term at least a decade out of date, even in 1955), and never escapes the sense of being just a bit wrong-footed, rather like the execrable movie treatment of Mildred Pierce mistreated its source material by wrenching it from the Depression to WWII. Frankie Machine (one suspects that the last name is either a nickname or an Americanization of some Polish jawbreaker) is supposed to be 29; contrary to the opinion of the gent on the DVD commentary track, Sinatra is not terribly convincing as a twentysomething, and Preminger wisely chucked the beanie-and-short-pants bit after his homecoming on a non-descript bus.
For me the best things about the movie were Saul Bass's opening titles, Elmer Bernstein's musical score, the incidental and supporting actors, and, OK, I'll concede -- Sinatra himself. The jazzy parts of the score, as good as they are, are also somewhat problematic: the music hots up whenever Frankie Machine is jonesing, effectively giving a sexual kick to his craving (moreso than Sinatra's decent acting here does), which is probably not exactly the message that the studio wanted to send. If you want to convince the young'uns that shooting horse is just no damn good, don't make the music scoring those scenes too inviting; Bernstein and jazz musicians Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne here are the mid-1950s equivalent of Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" pumping through the speakers when Ewan McGregor's Scottish hophead is running from the cops with his swag in Trainspotting.
According to Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, Sinatra was "tutored" by Manne in the fine art of being a junky. (Ask a jazz musician, right..?) Judge for yourself how well Sinatra was schooled: the still below is a close-up of Sinatra's eyes as Frankie takes his first fix after kicking his habit in the federal penitentiary hospital in Lexington, Kentucky:
It was decent -- better than I expected, actually, thanks largely to the supporting cast (particularly comedian Arnold Stang -- that's him in the cap and Coke bottle glasses, below, to the right of Sinatra -- and Darren "Kolchak, The Night Stalker" McGavin as the
silver-tongued pusher-cum-gambler Louie; Emile Meyer, so menacing in The Sweet Smell of Success, makes a welcome appearance as a police captain here) -- but it was still fairly draggy and staged in parts. Eleanor Parker's Zosh (rhymes with "Josh" in the movie, but it's probably supposed to be pronounced with a long "o," since it's short for "Sofia" or "Zofia"), Frankie's manipulative, smothering pill of a wife, was so irritating that she made me want to geez up, and no one in their right mind who's read as much of William S. Burroughs as I have would ever want to do that. I found myself longing for Richard Widmark's character from the 1947 noir classic Kiss of Death to show up to give Zosh a sleigh ride down the stairs of her tenement in her wheelchair.
Apparently the novel is set in the years immediately after WWII, when card dealer Frankie Machine returns to Chicago from the war with a Purple Heart and a morphine habit; the movie is intended to be set in the mid-1950s (check out Sinatra's scene with Kim Novak's Molly after he joins the musicians' union: they're window-shopping for the latest Detroit rolling stock and kitchen appointments, which clearly anchors the movie in the Eisenhower era, despite Sinatra saying, in another scene with Novak, that he'll drive the bobbysoxers wild: "bobbysoxers" being a historical term at least a decade out of date, even in 1955), and never escapes the sense of being just a bit wrong-footed, rather like the execrable movie treatment of Mildred Pierce mistreated its source material by wrenching it from the Depression to WWII. Frankie Machine (one suspects that the last name is either a nickname or an Americanization of some Polish jawbreaker) is supposed to be 29; contrary to the opinion of the gent on the DVD commentary track, Sinatra is not terribly convincing as a twentysomething, and Preminger wisely chucked the beanie-and-short-pants bit after his homecoming on a non-descript bus.
For me the best things about the movie were Saul Bass's opening titles, Elmer Bernstein's musical score, the incidental and supporting actors, and, OK, I'll concede -- Sinatra himself. The jazzy parts of the score, as good as they are, are also somewhat problematic: the music hots up whenever Frankie Machine is jonesing, effectively giving a sexual kick to his craving (moreso than Sinatra's decent acting here does), which is probably not exactly the message that the studio wanted to send. If you want to convince the young'uns that shooting horse is just no damn good, don't make the music scoring those scenes too inviting; Bernstein and jazz musicians Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne here are the mid-1950s equivalent of Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" pumping through the speakers when Ewan McGregor's Scottish hophead is running from the cops with his swag in Trainspotting.
According to Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, Sinatra was "tutored" by Manne in the fine art of being a junky. (Ask a jazz musician, right..?) Judge for yourself how well Sinatra was schooled: the still below is a close-up of Sinatra's eyes as Frankie takes his first fix after kicking his habit in the federal penitentiary hospital in Lexington, Kentucky: