Some Came Running.

In Some Came Running (1958), Frank Sinatra plays Dave Hirsh, a veteran (shocking) who returns to his hometown in Parkman, Indiana. He spends the duration of the film juggling relationships with Gwen French, a creative writing teacher played by Martha Hyer, and Ginnie Moorehead, a dumb floozy from Chicago played by Shirley MacLaine. Already, there is a dichotomy set up between Ginnie and Gwen--the two women are polar opposites.

Sinatra is much less the playboy in this film than he is in other films of the same era, but I think that's because the female characters don't allow him to be. The presence of Gwen, a strong, self-assured, confident woman, prevents Frank from lapsing into his playboy ways. Gwen rebuffs Frank's advances throughout much of the film and reprimands him, saying, "If you want to flatter me, I've only one good feature and that's my mind." She questions him about his friendly, cordial relationship with her father, asking, "Why can't you have the same kind of relationship with an intelligent woman?" Disappointingly, Gwen crumbles when Frank starts kissing her after she reads through a story he has written. As he pulls the pins out of her hair, she relaxes. Gwen must actually, physically "let her hair down" before she can be with him.

Even then, Gwen is still unsure about how she feels about Frank. He is surprisingly open with her, saying, "Just know that I'm the kid who wants to marry you. That is something I want more than anything else in the world,"but she is still wishy-washy.

Frank himself sets up this stark contrast between smart Gwen, who gets a job at a publishing house in New York, and Ginnie, who hasn't "got enough sense to come in out of the rain unless someone leads [her] by the hand."

It would seem that Ginnie is ready to give Frank whatever he wants and to play into the "bunny" stereotype, but she's actually pretty independent at the beginning of the film. At the beginning of the film, Frank drops her quickly after he realizes that he drunkenly brought her on a bus to Parkman, but Ginnie manages to find her way to the bar just fine. It is only then that audiences are introduced to her former lover, a mobster who has followed her to Parkman from Chicago. After this introduction, Ginnie becomes the damsel in distress. She is slavishly devoted to Frank and ends up throwing herself in front of him at the end of the film to save his life, sacrificing her own.

As we saw in Anchors Aweigh, Sinatra's performance changes greatly when the plot revolves primarily around the decisions and actions of female characters. Although Dave Hirsh is the main character in Some Came Running, the plot is really decided by Ginnie's and Gwen's actions. Their choices and ways of being prevent Sinatra from being the playboy. Instead, they pigeonhole him into begging for Gwen's hand in marriage and being protected from gunshots by Ginnie.