From Here to Eternity.

I don't see what the fuss is about.

Frank Sinatra won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953). 

Sinatra's role in the film was small. Granted, Maggio was an important figure in terms of plot advancement, but he had limited screen time and not a whole lot of dialogue. This is the role for which Sinatra fought so hard, used Mob muscle, had Ava Gardner beg and plead with the studio? 

I don't get it.

Maybe the film (and Sinatra as Maggio) received such hype and acclaim because it was Sinatra's first departure from the musical comedy genre and his first foray into serious drama. Like the previous films we have screened for class, Sinatra plays a military man, but From Here to Eternity uses the military to set up the context of the lives of the characters on base and of the power structure in place. 

In the Maggio character, Sinatra finds an avenue to prove how tough and masculine he can be. Maggio drinks copiously, flirts freely, and fights frequently. He is court marshaled and sent to the stockade for 6 months as punishment for a barroom brawl and for insubordination. Maggio finds his way out of the stockade with a carefully planned escape, but on his way back to his friend Prewitt, Maggio falls out of the back of his escape vehicle. He has been beaten recently, and the combination of the injuries from the beatings and from the fall prove to be too much for Maggio--he dies an uncomfortable death on screen, in the arms of his friend. 

Maggio would have had no place in Anchors Aweigh, It Happened in Brooklyn, or On The Town. He is too rough around the edges, too ethnic (he is frequently referred to as a "wop" by an antagonizing character). Only shiny, happy, perky Sinatra can sing and dance with Gene Kelly.