Could't Help but Smile - Sinatra and the Rat Pack in Ocean's 11

The famed Sinatra, Dean, Davis, and Lawford. I had heard about the original Ocean's 11, starring the mid-century epitomes of maleness knows as The Rat Pack, since the Soderberg's 2001 remake. Sam Harmon (Dean Martin) gets my vote for the most politically incorrect character in the film. Toward the beginning, he hails a black luggage valet, and after Sam tells him to put his bag in his car, he say at the man is rushing away, "Hold it," and pulls a coin from behind the valet's ear, as if he were a child. I thought the scene was racially insensitive. Later, the gang is dreaming about what they will do with all their riches after they pull off the heist that's central to the plot of the film. Sam says he'd go into politics, and that his platform would be to, "Repeal the 14th and the 20th amendments, take the vote away from the women, and make slaves out of them." I couldn't help but laugh at Martin's easy, matter-of-factor delivery, but I didn't feel a bit guilty afterward.


The truth is, most of the lead male characters in the film are misogynistic. My wife was watching with me, and she said at one point, "There's a huge division between the men and the women in this movie. Look at how they just kicked them out." She was referring to a scene that features Danny Ocean (Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford). Jimmy is lying stomach down on a couch getting a message from a beautiful women, and Sinatra is sitting on a chair receiving the same treatment. When Danny finds out that one of the men he wants for his huge Las Vegas heist refuses to join the team, he decides it's time to talk important business. "Okay girls, time for your nap. Beat it," he says, patting Lawford's "masseuse" on her dairy aire as she exits the room. The women are more like pets than people, and the men can't have their pets around while they're working.

Booze Broads and Books

I don't think we've seen a more blatant exploration of the tender tough guy than we find in Some Came Running. Throughout this semester, Sinatra has been touted as being both hyper-masculine and hyper-sensitive. We've heard it said that through his singing he was able to tap into deep emotions of loneliness and vulnerability, emotions that plagued him in his personal life. We've heard tales of his epic drinking and smoking, his drunken bar fights, and his escapades (sexual and otherwise) with numerous women including Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Marlene Dietrich. As Dave Hirsh in Some Came Running, he plays a former writer who returns to his hometown after military service. Hirsh is throwing around money, brushing off women, tossing back whiskey, smoking cigarettes, and making plans for a high-stakes card game, and this before 11am. Right from the start of the film, Sinatra's character pronounces his masculinity through an association with nearly all the traits that define postwar manliness. Hirsh even has a drunken bar fight of his own about a third through the film. The tough half of the tender tough guys is clearly established. As for the tender half, what better way to make a character hyper-sensitive than to make him a novelist? Toward the end of the movie, creative writing teacher/love interest, Gwen French (played by Martha Hyer), describes "good writers" as individuals who "feel more deeply than the rest of us." Though she references writers like Poe, Johnson, and Baudelaire in the scene (and not Hirsh), it is easy to draw the parallel between her remarks and the deep-feeling Hirsh who has, a few scenes earlier, helped his young, desperate niece out of a serious bind. Earlier in the film, Gwen's father, Robert French (played by Larry Gates), makes this insight into Hirsh's character: "You know it isn't immediately apparent, but he's an extremely sensitive man." 

In Some Came Running, it's booze, broads, fighting, poker, and books for the brash, emotional Hirsh. Sinatra, whose life was filled with the very same things, portrays the character with impressive ease--always the mark of a good actor.

Post Time

Sinatra portray's Joe E. Lewis in The Joker is Wild as comedian that slurs his speech, has an obsession with using his hands when he talks, and accentuates a good deal of his head movements with jittery energy. Lewis is a sad clown, both on and off the stage. In fact, in many ways, because he uses comedy as a protective hedge against the tragedies of his reality, Lewis is always on stage, always performing his sad clown routine. Sinatra delivers Lewis's brand of comedy with pitch-perfect timing. He has the shtick down-pat: the way he drops his head after each punchline, and puts on a fake frown, and rises his shoulders and his hands to the audience throughout the body of the jokes, these things are perfect physical accompaniments to the attitudes fueling Lewis's sad clown routine.

A scene that demands a different sort of acting occurs toward the beginning of the film when Lewis wakes up after his throat has been cut. Sinatra throws himself against the hospital wall and wails an inarticulate cry of pure agony. Lewis has realized what's happened to him, and for him, it is the worst possible news. It is worse than death, and Sinatra, along with the head dressing, the make-up, and the camera angle is able to communicate this moment of utter defeat.

On a nit-picky note, I've seen it a couple of times in other films, and I think the way Sinatra wipes tears off a woman's cheek is a bit unsightly. He uses his pinkies, or the very tips of his fingers, and barely touches the woman's face. But it's not like he is being gentle or loving. It's as if he doesn't want to ruin her foundation, which could possibly be the case. Also, I've seen it in The Manchurian Candidate, and now here. Sinatra runs like a girl. Every time Sinatra runs out to the stage as Lewis he swings his arms low at his hips, and saunters like a teenage running through a meadow after her first kiss. But these are small gripes, developed after almost three months of absorption with all thing Sinatra. Overall, I have been, and remain, convinced that he is a wonderful actor and an extraordinary singer. The man overflows with talent. It's almost unfair. No...it is unfair.

Tender Trap’s Playboy

Sinatra’s Charlie Reader is a prime example of the 1950s playboy in Charles Walter’s The Tender Trap. A key characteristic that helps identify him as such is his career. In the April 1956 issue of Playboy, the magazine defines their ideal reader as a man who takes “joy in his work without regarding it as the end and all of living.” As a top theatrical talent agent in New York City, a good part of Charlie’s job involves sitting back and watching beautiful women sing and dance during auditions. It is during one such audition that Charlie meets Julie Gills (Debbie Reynolds), the woman he ends up falling in love with. Also important is the fact that while Charlie is at work during the audition, and afterward at the restaurant when he offers Julie the part in the musical, he is accompanied by his good friend Joe McCall (played by David Wayne) who is visiting from out of town, and his main sex interest Sylvia Crewes (played by Celeste Holm), indicating the level of freedom in Charlie’s line of business. The fact that Charlie is watching gorgeous women sing and dance, is surrounded by friend, and is dining at a nice restaurant, all while at work are examples of him taking joy in his job.

Even though his job is a pleasant one, Charlie does not consider his work the end and all of living. Non-work-related pleasure ranks higher on his list than productive pleasure. This is evident in the opening scene of the film that has Charlie lounging on his sofa with his lovely sex interest, Poppy Masters (played by Lola Albright). This is how Charlie spends the middle of his day. It is a far cry from the humdrum work life of the man droning away in an office cubicle. Charlie spends a good portion of the film mixing/consuming drinks, going to dinners, to shows, to dance clubs. He even has a huge engagement party whose aftermath is a precursor to the famed scene in last year’s hit comedy, The Hangover. At a playboy, Charlie’s relationships with women are the focus of his life. His job is but a minor, albeit enjoyable, part of his existence.

When I Move, Watch My Smoke

"When I move, watch my smoke." The line comes early in Frank Sinatra's The Man with the Golden Arm, the 1955 drama about a heroin addict trying to go straight. What's interesting about the phrase is that it can be read in at least two ways. One, it can be taken the way Sinatra's Frankie Machine intends it, as a confident proclamation of his ability to make good things happen quickly for himself. Two, one could read "smoke" as a subtle reference to addiction (the smoke of cigarettes/nicotine, or more pertinent, the smoke of heroin). While Machine's preferred method of using heroin is intravenously, this doesn't erase from the consciousness of the audience the fact that heroin is frequently smoked instead of injected. If one allows for the association between smoke and addiction, the line takes on a whole different meaning: when Machine "moves" it leads him into the hands of his old dealer, and what we are left to watch is him being sucked back into his addiction.

What Sinatra is able to do well in this film is convey, simultaneously, both of the ideas behind this phrase. He alternates between the head-high, starry-eyed, optimistic dreamer and the defeated addict who is dominated by his need for a fix. At the beginning of the film when Machine gets off the bus holding his drums, there is a skip in his step and a smirk on his face. He looks everyone he runs into in the eye. His movements are quick and snappy. In contrast, when Machine is coerced into taking a fix by Louie's candy addiction story near the middle of the film, he mopes across the street to the dealers apartment. He head his low, his step sluggish.

Throughout the film Sinatra performs in these two modes--the optimistic dreamer and the conflicted addict--often times times switching between them in the same scene. When he looks into the pool hall at the beginning of the film, he face goes from bright and hopeful to serious and downcast at witnessing the one-armed alcoholic being ridiculed and made to dance for a drink. And then in one second, he looks down, see his friend Sparrow (played by Arnold Stang) and his face lights up again. Sinatra's facial expressions are not theatrical. They are performed with natural reserve, and yet because of his presence on the screen and his cinematic energy, a smile, a slight shift in his eyes, is more than enough to show the switch between the conflicted addict watching another addict dance, and the high-hopes dreamer seeing an old friend.

What Would a Thespian Sinatra Look Like?

In his dramatic roles, Frank Sinatra demonstrates his abilities as an actor. After viewing From Here to Eternity, Kings Go Forth, Man with the Golden Arm, and now, The Manchurian Candidate, I'm left wondering if I'm impressed with Sinatra as an actor because I didn't think of him as an actor, or if he actually does hold his own in the company of thespian titans such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Stewart, et cetera.

Two Sinatra scenes in The Manchurian Candidate come to mind as scenes that could potentially pose a challenge for an actor. The train scene in the first half of the film, wherein Sinatra's Bennet Marco meets Eugenie Rose Chaney (played by Janet Leigh), requires Sinatra to be depressed, nervous, vulnerable, and distracted all at once. He's sweating. He can't manage his drink and his cigarette at the same time. He can't steady a match. Sinatra rides the line between the melodramatic and the tempered, realistic mode of character portrayal as exemplified by actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando, and he ride it well. He is not over the top, and yet the deeply emotional and distraught state Bennet finds himself in is heap onto the screen by Sinatra. This ability to be intense without being theatrical is a testament to Sinatra's acting abilities.

The second scene that comes to mind is one that requires something rather absurd from an actor. Toward the end of the film, Bennet meets Laurence Harvey's Raymond Shaw in a hotel to show him a deck of cards filled with Queens of Hearts. In this case, the difficult acting I want to point out is not required of Sinatra. Harvey is to portray his character being un-brainwashed. The "links" that are embedded in his brain, causing him to be the slave of a group who intends to use him to assassinate the President of the United States, being smashed, busted up, tore down. Harvey twitches his eyes, shifting them back and forth. Sometimes his stare is lazy, sometimes its distant, sometimes its intense. He keeps his lips tight, his face stoic until he remember the horrific act he's committed. And when the phone rings, there is a definitive relaxing of his features, a coming-to, a bringing of his face back to the concrete moment. It is good acting on Harvey's part. In this same scene, Sinatra delivers his lines with natural punch. He never distracts from the moment. His commitment to the narrative moment make it all the more intense and believable.

Because I feel that some acting is completely sublime, that actors like DeNiro, Streep, Penn, and others have more recently performed on screen in ways Sinatra never did, I can't say his is a phenomenal actor, but he does hold his own. He has the chops. He is not a hack-job making his way on the thrust of his musical career, as so many "actors" do today.

Thanks for the Pass

Hi Prof. Wojcik...thanks for the blog pass this week. I've spent the time digging deeper into my research on "the playboy." I'm enjoying your chapter on apartments!

See you in class.