Sinatra in Hollywood
By Tom Santopietro. Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press), New York, 2008. 530 pages.
He’s been the subject of several, but Frank Sinatra never acted in an actual Broadway musical. His status as a musical theater legend came from the other coast: he starred in the films of On the Town (parts of which were filmed in New York) and Guys and Dolls and the Cole Porter-scored High Society (based on Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story). He would’ve starred in the movie of Carousel instead of Gordon McRae if the studio hadn’t insisted on separate takes of every scene, so it could release both regular and Technicolor versions. Studio head Jack Warner wanted Sinatra to do the Music Man movie instead of the show’s Broadway star Robert Preston.
Even in his waning years, when he hardly acted at all, Sinatra turned a Kander and Ebb theme song from a not-well-received movie into a pop standard, and stuck “Good Thing Going” from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along onto one of his albums.
I tore through this 530-page tome to get to the bits about the theater-related Sinatra flicks, particularly Tender Trap and The Joker is Wild. Both yielded hit songs but are non-musicals, and there’s not a while lot of scholarship available on either.
The Tender Trap is a much better play than it is a movie (though if it weren’t for the movie we wouldn’t have its great Sammy Cahn theme song). I think it can be seen as an iconic theater piece of the 1950s, when the live theater was struggling against the onslaught of television and Technicolor and survived by creating hipper, younger fare. Max Shulman, famous for his college-based humor (he created Dobie Gillis) co-wrote Tender Trap, and it originally starred Ronny Graham, a major force in the cabaret revue movement of the ‘50s.
The Joker is Wild is a solid adaptation of Art Cohn’s biography of Joe E. Lewis, a showbiz bio that was usually gritty for its time. Lewis was a singer who became a comedian, and who needed to because some gangsters slashed his throat when he tried to take his career beyond mob-owned clubs in Chicago.
Both these Sinatra faves of mine get better-than-expected treatment is Santopietro’s book, even if the author personally finds The Tender Trap “tiresome” and The Joker is Wild “markedly uneven.”
There’s great context provided, for starters:
The Tender Trap represented Sinatra’s first return to MGM in five years, and opened on November 17, 1955, a mere three days after the premiere of Guys and Dolls. The first-ever film to present Frank Sinatra as the leading man in a comedy, it even garnered some critical approval, with The Hollywood Reporter declaring the film “Colorful as a bright new lipstick and as merry as sixth martini.”
Santiopietro also brings up some TV productions Sinatra did that don’t get much attention in other books, including the NBC adaptation of Anything Goes alongside Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman. He did this live telecast in the midst of his major movie comeback period of the mid-1950s—it aired between the releases of From Here to Eternity and Suddenly. But despite its popularity it doesn’t usually get figured into Sinatra’s career-renewal equation. The Anything Goes TV show (just an hour long) was released just last month on DVD.
Sinatra in Hollywood is well researched, but mostly depends on the most popular Sinatra biographies. It leans very heavily on Nancy and Tina Sinatra’s memoirs. But rehashing behind-the-scenes tales isn’t really the point of the book. Santopietro diligently screens and comments upon just about every recorded screen acting job Sinatra ever did. He can overreach for adjectives—there’s lot of over-the-top qualifying phrases like “would be putting it mildly” or “the exact opposite of…”—but the mere fact that one man has examined all these documents is useful. When Santopietro boils his opinions down to simple letter grades, it proves to be quite the balanced career appraisal: 10 As, 24 Bs, 25 Cs,, 10 Ds and one F (for Cannonball Run 2; no argument there).
Santopietro is pretty hard on Double Dynamite, an admittedly formulaic yet otherwise inoffensive feature with a couple of good songs made on the cheap and co-starring Groucho Marx. Santopietro blames it as the nail in the coffin which nearly shut down Sinatra’s film stardom altogether.
Santopietro opens his book with an impassioned defense of Sinatra as an accomplished actor—not just good but great, he argues—and counters the common wisdom that Sinatra was like Elvis, sloughing through film projects that fell outside his recording-studio or concert-stage comfort zones. He finds validation for this thesis in the words of Sinatra himself, who when asked by Johnny Carson what he thought were major highlights of his career, mentioned his straight acting roles in From Here to Eternity and The Man With a Golden Arm. The fact that such an opinion-packed and well-rounded 530-page book could be devoted to just this one facet of Sinatra’s life and work is a fine summation of that argument.
This is a guy who could hold his own in musicals against Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett, Brando, Sammy Davis Jr… All the more pity that he never trod the stage as an actor.