Frankie goes to Hollywood

THIS reviewer’s introduction to Ol’ Blue Eyes came, strangely, via the pages of a 1970s soccer magazine.

Every week, a footballer would be subjected to a Q&A designed to reveal the man rather than the sportsman – what car did he drive, his food of choice, his greatest moment, that sort of thing. When it came to favourite singer, my footballing heroes invariably chose some guy called Frank Sinatra.

To a kid growing up in a house full of Beatles and Motown records this Sinatra fella was a mystery but if he was good enough for the likes of Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton and Johnny Giles he was definitely worthy of my attention.

So, rather than question the wisdom of professional footballers as cynically as my future self would, I followed their unwitting advice and the reward was a musical talent of rare quality, with the ability to lift popular standards high above mediocrity with his unique and heartfelt phrasing.

Like the mutton-chopped footballers of the early Seventies, Sinatra ‘The Voice’ is the one whom most people identify with but, as Timothy Knight’s book reminds us, there was an Oscar-winning career on the silver screen that ran parallel to his phenomenally successful recording work, and it was a substantial one at that.

While Sinatra recorded close to 2,000 songs over six decades, his celluloid body of work ran to more than 60 movies between 1941 and 1991.

His acting range was as impressive as his output, from song-and-dance man in musical classics such as On The Town, High Society and Guys and Dolls, to action hero in Von Ryan’s Express and in critically acclaimed dramatic roles in The Manchurian Candidate, The Man With The Golden Arm, Pal Joey and From Here To Eternity, the 1953 film that earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as ill-fated World War II army private Angelo Maggio.

“Sinatra: Hollywood His Way” catalogues those roles and every other in the star’s long career in a large and glossy volume that runs to more than 300 pages.

It is extremely well presented, chock full of crisp photographic stills from each movie and cast and crew details to accompany the author’s plot synopses, description of the production and summary of the critical response at time of release.

And in those descriptions Knight sets out to back up the contention he lays out in the introduction that Sinatra was a “bona-fide movie star, a magnetic actor” who “never quite got his due in the Hollywood pantheon”.

The format of this coffee-table book, however, only dissipates that argument. In taking an encyclopaedic approach and cataloguing Sinatra’s every role chronologically, Knight’s fair-mindedness undermines his thesis in giving equal weighting to each of the actor’s roles, good, bad or indifferent.

In this context, the 1971 howler Dirty Dingus Magee is given equal billing to Sinatra’s crowning turn in From Here To Eternity, and his effortless brilliance in Pal Joey afforded the same space as purely effortless outings in humdrum affairs such as 4 For Texas.

Too often in this catalogue, there is too much effort given to the plot synopses, which Knight makes as exposition-heavy as some of Sinatra’s more tedious movies, and not enough to the production itself or the approach to the role that would let us in on the author’s assertion that Sinatra was an actor up there with the Hollywood greats.

There are some interesting insights into Sinatra’s ‘craft’, including his differences with co-stars such as Marlon Brando during the making of Guys and Dolls. Already bearing a grudge having lost out to Brando for the lead role in On The Waterfront, Sinatra called his rival “mumbles” and could not abide his lengthy rehearsal process to each scene.

Sinatra, it seems, was easily bored and would often insist on doing only one take, preferring a spontaneous approach while other movie descriptions highlight the way the actor’s success as a recording artist often impacted on productions, interfering with schedules and budgets as the singer flew on and off set to perform in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

Yet this is all information that has been well covered before and a look at Knight’s bibliography only intensifies the feeling that this book is a well-assembled compendium. And a good-looking one too, reminding us how Sinatra shared the screen with a remarkable array of stars, worked with some of the best directors of his generation and held his own as a dancer with the likes of Gene Kelly.

There are annoyances, such as the grabbing of quotes from the movies to be highlighted on each page. Take this, for instance, blown up and emboldened in the margin down the side of the Pal Joey section:

“I know all about you. I don’t want you sniffing around the customers’ dames. One false move and you’re out on your Francis” – accompanied by a caption for the quote: “Barbary Coast manager Mike Miggins (Hank Henry) laying down the law to his new emcee Joes Evans.”

What purpose does this serve, out of context, and bearing no relevance to the premise of the book? One would have preferred an actual Sinatra quote or something, from anybody, related to the production. And while the pictures from the movies are enjoyable to view, it would have been good to mix in more behind the scenes images.

That said, “Sinatra: Hollywood His Way” is an enjoyable and attractive reference work, an ideal companion to the movies themselves and a reminder that, while he was no Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster or, indeed, Brando, Frank Sinatra was more than just ‘The Voice’.