Frank Sinatra season at the BFI

Frank Sinatra was the inspiration for a legion of crooners, but a new BFI Southbank season reminds us that Ol‘ Blue Eyes also had an impressive screen career, argues David Jenkins

Frank Sinatra, despite a triumphant career that spanned almost 60 years, has left a complex legacy. He set a precedent of largesse, sexual promiscuity and ruthless control freakery to a generation of wannabe tough guys. Sure, he could hold a tune, but was there anything more to The Voice? A month-long season of Sinatra’s films at the BFI Southbank will offer a new perspective on the singer, suggesting that, unlike such deities as David Bowie, Bob Dylan and even Elvis, he was more than just a crooner. The kid could act, too.

The earliest of his films to be screened will be 1944’s ‘Step Lively’, a pleasant, if formulaic RKO musical romp that feels like a rudimentary change of platform to sate the hordes of his screaming bobbysoxer fans. Sinatra stars (with an expression of bemusement throughout) as a naïve playwright who is given the runaround by a Broadway shyster but quickly gets browbeaten into starring in a musical when (you guessed it) they hear him sing.

Worth catching, by the way, is the wholesome , fluffy accompanying short, ‘The House I Live In’ (1945), which was produced on the back of a promise Sinatra gave to President Franklin Roosevelt to address ‘young people’ about the need for racial tolerance. Frank, taking time out from a recording session , interrupts a group of kids attacking a young Jewish boy.

‘Look fellas,’ says Frank, ‘You know what this country is? It’s made up of a hundred different kinds of people, and they’re all Americans.’

‘Step Lively’ and Sinatra’s previous ‘Higher and Higher’ (1943) paved the way for a number of larger-scale MGM musicals that culminated in Stanley Donan’s comic masterpiece ‘On The Town’ (1949), playing here in a brand new print. The film – about love-struck sailors on furlough in New York – presents the young Sinatra as being more than a just gangly teen idol with a gargantuan quiff.

A supporting actor Oscar followed for his salty turn as Private Angelo Maggio in sweeping World War II romance ‘From Here to Eternity’ (1953) – a much-needed boost for an artist whose career was in the doldrums. The stories of how Sinatra eventually got the part range from him bombarding the studio head with telegrams (which he would cheekily sign ‘from Maggio’) to an alleged discreet Mafia intervention, used by Mario Puzo for his famous horse’s head scene in ‘The Godfather’.

Some of the mid-period films have aged badly. Charles Walters’ ‘High Society’ (1956) is a terrible, gaudy, dated musical about how frightfully misunderstood the upper classes are. ‘Pal Joey’ (1957), on the other hand, (despite cack-handed direction from George Sidney) is a real treat and contains a stirring performance of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ and a torrent of smart-alec one-liners. ‘Tony Rome’ (1967) is a decent noir throwback with Sinatra doing his best Bogart impersonation, but replacing the trenchcoat, fedora and hipflask with a lemon-yellow rollneck, sailor’s hat and gin martini. ‘Von Ryan’s Express’ (1965) is still a fun wartime action romp, and ‘Meet Danny Wilson’ (1952) and ‘None but the Brave’ (1965) – his sole directorial effort – will receive very rare screenings at the season.

The question of his best performance, though, is a tough one. It leads us to four films: the first is Otto Preminger’s Nelson Algren adaptation ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ (1955). Sinatra’s junkie drummer Frankie Machine is film’s greatest asset; initially smothered by flat, theatrical direction, it culminates in one of cinema’s most harrowing cold turkey scenes.

The second is Sinatra’s turn in John Frankenheimer’s superior political thriller, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), as an American army major brainwashed by Communists at the height of the Cold War. It’s the film that Sinatra was most proud of. The third is 1968’s ‘The Detective’, an angular New York-set policier that comes across as a meditative and world-weary spin on labyrinthine 1940s noirs.

His best film, however, was Vincente Minnelli’s hugely underrated family melodrama, ‘Some Came Running’ (1958). Here, Sinatra delivers his most complex, graceful and nuanced performance as a jaded writer back from army service who finds himself back in his tranquil Midwestern hometown with Shirley MacLaine’s good-time girl.

In many ways, Sinatra’s screen career offered an interesting counterpoint to the machismo of his stage persona, further reflected by the time, effort and interest he would later invest into actually producing and financing his films. Performances like the one he delivers in ‘Some Came Running’ show a gift for introspection and melancholy you wouldn’t expect from a man who was spending much of his time in a Las Vegas hotel, drunkenly crooning and delivering tasteful ‘ethnic’ jokes to audiences alongside Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

‘Sinatra! The Voice on Screen’ is at BFI Southbank throughout May.