Frank & Drugs.

In The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, an aspiring musician and not-really-recovering heroin addict. The film has quite a few vivid scenes of Machine shooting up and going through withdrawal. It was difficult to watch Sinatra in this role, and I imagine it would have been downright unsettling for audiences to see 55 years ago.

This week in class, we spent time discussing the way that Sinatra uses cigarettes in his films and musical performances to create drama and to emphasize his fragile brand of masculinity. As Frankie Machine, Sinatra uses cigarettes as devices to reveal his character and accentuate the seriousness of his heroin addiction.

Near the beginning of the film, Machine establishes himself as a deceptive card shark by performing a sleight-of-hand trick with a cigarette. This scene takes place when Machine and Sparrow are sitting in jail, and Sparrow asks Machine to "do a cigarette trick, just to break the monotony." After he is released from jail, Machine gets roped into dealing cards for Schwiefka. His hands shake as he is dealing, so Machine goes outside to have a cigarette to calm his nerves and to attempt to stave off the symptoms of heroin withdrawal. Later, when Machine goes to light a cigarette for his girlfriend Molly, his hands shake and he becomes oddly fascinated by the lit match. It is then that Molly realizes that Machine has relapsed.

Machine says, "I guess in the beginning you do it only for kicks," in reference to his heroin habit. Drug users of all stripes have uttered these words about all sorts of substances, from legal ones like nicotine and alcohol to illegal ones like heroin.

The Man With The Golden Arm was hard to watch because the Frankie Machine character was not well-marked as different from Frank Sinatra himself. Musicians, womanizers, Franks.

I found myself really hating Zosh, Machine's faux-crippled wife. Besides the fact that the character deceives her husband and clingily manipulates him into staying with her, I thought the actress was unbearably annoying. I was glad to see Zosh take herself out of the picture at the end of the film.