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.
