“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

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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.

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