‘Some Came Running’: The Movie Frank Sinatra Couldn’t Stand Working On—And That Happens To Have One Of His Very Best Performances

Some Came Running is the first of seven films in which Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin would appear together; its making commemorated the beginning of a lifelong friendship not only between the two soon-to-be Rat Packers, but with their female lead Shirley MacLaine. This was only MacLaine’s fourth film, and Martin’s third film after breaking up his partnership with Jerry Lewis. A big picture in its release year of 1958, it’s still a landmark of silver-age Hollywood moviemaking, and it’s now streaming on Netflix.

MGM was keen to adapt the sprawling 1957 novel by James Jones, his followup to the pre-WWII epic From Here To Eternity, the film version of which was a great success for Columbia Pictures in 1953. Jones’ book, six years in the writing, focused on the struggles of Dave Hirsh, onetime novelist turned soldier, who returns to his home, a sort of Anytown U.S.A. in Illinois, after years away. Jones’ book was one of those Search-For-Meaning-In-Complacent-Postwar-America deals, and it became a bestseller in spite of brutally negative reviews. Harvey Swados, writing in The New Republic, called its events “continuously sordid, and more than faintly nauseating,” lambasted its “sophomoric and jejune philosophizing,” and concluded that it was an “extraordinarily immature and undisciplined book.”

The studio tasked star director Vincente Minnelli to streamline the 1,000-page plus novel to fit the contours of the screen melodrama, a then-popular genre, focusing on the band of small-town outsiders portrayed by Sinatra, Martin, and MacLaine—the latter two play a gambler and a prostitute with whom Dave becomes entangled. Loneliness and longing bang up against small-town hypocrisy as Dave’s pulled toward respectability by his weasel brother and a local schoolteacher (Arthur Kennedy and Martha Hyer respectively; Kennedy, a great character actor, really does a great job here playing a Major Dink, and he, MacLaine, and Hyer were all nominated for Oscars for their work). It all ends tragically, as screen melodramas of the time tended to do.

But Minnelli, who began his film career in production design, was a master of color, composition, and camera movement, aside from being, as is noted of this movie’s hero, “a terribly sensitive man.” The direction of this widescreen movie has a palpable breadth and sweep. (And the HD version playing on Netflix shows off its qualities very well.) His male leads weren’t crazy about the director’s meticulousness. When he got meaty a role in From Here To Eternity, Sinatra was practically a Hollywood bottom feeder, but by the end of the Fifties he was feeling his oats again, and he bristled at all the waiting around he and his relatively new pally Dino had to do on set, reportedly walking off more than once. But for all that, Sinatra’s performance is one of his most quietly impressive, and Martin and MacLaine are equally great. Their work, combined with the movie’s impeccable cinematic sense, make Some Came Running soar.

The movie’s a personal favorite of mine—on the night I got canned from my job at the website for the defunct Premiere magazine back in 2008, I started a blog that I named after the movie. As for why, it’s a hard question to answer exactly. It’s not just my regard for the movie itself, but also that the movie pulls together a lot of my own enthusiasms, and the enthusiasms associated with film itself. A cursory look beneath its gorgeous surfaces reveal all manner of cultural correspondences and themes that make it look like a crucial cynosure of 20th Century concerns. The books that Dave pulls out of his duffel bag when he checks into the hotel—The Portable Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe—evoke a whole world of American Aspiration, and also bring to mind some of literary critic (and World War II veteran) Paul Fussell’s observations on the “greatest generation,” observations made well before Tom Brokaw coined that term. Director Minnelli’s work was greatly admired and occasionally deplored by the future directors of the French New Wave, and Jean-Luc Godard included a pointed Some Came Running reference in his own house-of-mirrors attempt at commercial cinema, 1963’s Contempt. Then, of course, there’s the fact that the movie is, in a sense, the story of a has-been writer. But let’s not read too much into that.

[Watch Some Came Running on Netflix]

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!