Some Came Running 1958

 

Hot plate melodrama. Made in the late 50’s but set down in small town America 1948, the film looks very much of its late 50’s time in fashion and decor. Never mind, it’s still glows for me after all these years in a beautiful glossy brightly colored Blu Ray. This was one of my favorite films of my childhood with much personal history attached to it. At 11 I tried to go see it by myself one afternoon at my neighborhood Loew’s but was turned away, “hey kid come back with an adult.” Which I did, one Friday  night with my mom who took off early from working at our family luncheonette. We sat in the balcony she smoked and I grew up a little watching these vivid characters play out their sordid lives.

My grandfather’s cousin Sol C. Siegel produced it, he did look like my beloved grandfather, and the villain of the film Steven Peck was a Brooklyn guy who would sometimes come in to our luncheonette for some lunch. So I watched with a glazed look and what did I think when Sinatra at the beginning of the film on a bus into town goes looking for his missing wallet and finds it down in his pants. Along with this very brazen touch, out pops from the bus, the garish Shirley MacLaine with her silly bunny rabbit purse and her kewpie doll look. The clothes by the way were brilliant, not 40’s but wonderful and vulgar and McLaine with a little rouge on her cheeks wore them well. She was a tootsie roll, an easy girl, kind and sweet with a heavy crush on the Sinatra character who we learn he picked her up in Chicago. I was mad about McLaine, having seen her in the Martin & Lewis comedy “Artists and Models” the Hitchcock thriller “The Trouble With Harry” and Around The World In 80 Days”a few years earlier, this was her big breakthrough film, getting her an Oscar nomination, and a long impressive movie career lasting nearly 70 years. 

 

The town they just pulled into is Sinatra’s childhood home, and was filmed in Madison Indiana so it has a small town authentic feel to it with many of the town folk playing extras. His antagonistic brother still resides there running his nasty wife’s family jewelry store and raising their teenage daughter named Dawn.  Played with his usual good work by Arthur Kennedy (Oscar nominated) along with his nasty wife who has a dark cloud over her head, and hate in her heart acted by the wonderful Leora Dana. By the way many years later while I was at an artist colony of sorts who should I meet but the very Leora, who was residing there with her female lover who ran the place. She fled from my admirations swiftly, no doubt still in 1950’s closet mode. I said the film had a personal history for me.

Frank is a writer just out of the army, and out of his luggage comes various books by well known authors which he lovely places on his cheap hotel dresser. He had a book published once that was well received but he’s given up the game and now out of the army is at loose ends. Frank is soon hanging out at  nearest bar, Smitty’s drinking and meeting the other main character of this blue plate special, Dean Martin as Bama who is a snarky gambler and misogynist and never takes off his hat. He even sleeps in it, one of his main twists confides. This character and his hat will travel film history and in an homage from Godard will turn up in his “Contempt” with the great Michel Piccoli also keeping his hat on and going as far as to take a bath with it on his head. Sometimes I think the French love our films, more than we do.

There is a relaxed ease between Bama and Sinatra’s Dave Hirsh that is a little too familiar and easy. On more recent viewings I had to keep pulling myself away from their laid  back relationship knowing their very personal history was showing at the seams. This hurts the film a little, but it’s so good that like a rubber band I snapped back into the whirl of it. Pushed by his brother and sister in law to get with it and start meeting some class, they take Dave and two of their acquaintances father and daughter professors at the local college to dinner at their fancy country club and Sinatra comes on too strong to the daughter played by the tightly wound up Martha Hyer (Oscar nominated) who is interested in Sinatra as a writer and not as a lover. Frank is also tightly wound up around Martha who keeps trying to keep him at a distance.   

Of course I would later realize down my long road of movie watching that Martha was 1948/1958 frigid, her hair style sure gives that away. And in a great sequence later in the film Frank lets her hair fall loose as a bright sunny room is suddenly turned dark as they embrace. A great and thrilling scene. 

 

Martha’s father (played by the very good Larry Gates) is full of daddy advice not only for her, but for Frank who he takes a big liking to and is constantly calling him “dear Dave.” Why is he calling him dear Dave I whispered to my mom through her cigarette smoke, because he likes him, she whispered back to me. People in Brooklyn didn’t speak like that, no one ever called me dear Ira. 

Meanwhile Shirley is fighting off her past lover, Raymond and falling in love with Frank who treats her badly when he’s not drunk. Based on the sprawling novel by James Jones who did not find the kind of success he did with his first novel “From Here To Eternity” and directed by Vincente Minnelli with restrained flair and a great use of Cinemascope. Minnelli fills his interior scenes with careful placement of people and lots of small details both in the people and the interiors. Watch how McLaine eats a hamburger and notice her posture. How she walks and moves is also telling of her character, she’s like a rag doll or that already mention Kewpie doll looking for a place to call her own. 

Also of note is his use of actual locations in the town, including a telling shot outside Hyer’s house which  is lovely and in a pastoral landscape except for the two large brick chimneys across the green valley belching out smoke and pollutants.  Minnelli’s palate is subtle and subdued until the vivid tragic and shocking climax that takes place in a whirling brightly hued Technicolor neon twist of a carnival that swirls and flows into one of the great sequences of 50’s cinema.