Ocean's Eleven.

No, not the George Clooney one.

Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals star in the original 1960 version of Ocean's Eleven. Frank teams up with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford for this film, shot on location in Las Vegas. The film portrays the exploits of a reunited army unit as they try to rob five casinos on the same night. It's truly a "Rat Pack era" film--much of the action takes place in and around the casinos, and booze, women and money are plentiful.

I'd like to take a closer look at one particular scene which gives a glimpse of the Rat Pack lifestyle. After all the vets arrive in Las Vegas, Frank (Danny Ocean) lays out the plan and clues his buddies in as to how much they can expect to net from the venture. Later on, the men sit around in a sort of gameroom/bar area and discuss what they plan to do with their shares of the take. Their conversations reveal their attitudes towards women, racial others and politics.

Dean Martin (Sam Harmon) makes some noise about repealing the 14th and 20th amendments, so he could "take the vote away from women and make slaves out of 'em." Misogynistic remarks like this carry on throughout the film, epitomizing the playboy attitude.

When asked what he plans to do with the money, Frank's remarks aren't much friendlier to females. He says, "I'd do somethin' for world peace. Buy out the Miss Universe pageant and take all the girls out. Sit down and talk to them individually, you know. Find out how things are in Sweden." He goes on to speak about bringing all of the Miss Universe contestants to New Orleans for a weekend, and his friends agree that Frank's idea is a good one.

Peter Lawford (Jimmy Foster) is primarily interested in going into politics and maybe buying some votes with his newfound cash to get there. Racking his brain for a high-ranking but low-profile position, he says, "You know how much money a man could steal if he were....uhh...Commissioner of Indian Affairs? That's what I'll be." It's interesting to note Lawford's character's supposed interest in politics here. Lawford married Patricia Kennedy in 1954, making him brother-in-law to John F. Kennedy. In 1960, the same year that Ocean's Eleven was released, Lawford became an American citizen so he could vote for his brother-in-law in the presidential election. Lawford and the rest of the Rat Pack actively campaigned for Kennedy.

Sammy Davis, Jr. (Josh Howard) suggests that perhaps Lawford could be an ambassador. Lawford replies, "Yeah, in a small country like Andorra," again seaching for a cushy, low-stress appointment. Here, Sammy pipes in, "Or Little Rock!" This, and the fact that the audience is introduced to Sammy as he sings the blues, continues to identify Sammy as a racial other, which, in the Rat Pack, he is. Although we know that Frank was a longtime crusader for civil rights, it seems odd that Sammy is set apart in such a distinct way in this film.

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.

Frank & Joe E. Lewis

On Tuesday in class, we watched a concert Sinatra gave at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas in the 1970s, which fit nicely with our film screening this week, The Joker is Wild (1957). In the film, Sinatra plays Joe E. Lewis, singer and nightclub comedian. Sinatra greatly admired Lewis and commonly referred to Lewis as a master of the trade, so it was interesting to see Sinatra portray one of his heroes on the silver screen.

The Joker is Wild tells the tale of Lewis's fight to regain stardom after a violent brush with the Mob prevents him from singing again. Vocal cords sliced, Lewis is forced to find a route to celebrity that doesn't rely on his pipes, so he turns to comedy. Sinatra came to imitate Lewis's gentle teasing and self-deprecating manner in his live performances. Sinatra also picked up Lewis's style of ribbing his friends and acquaintances in the audience. In fact, at the concert at Caesar's Palace, Sinatra used one of the same jokes that Sinatra-as-Lewis uses in the film. Teasing an older celebrity in attendance at the show, Sinatra chortles, 'He's been dead for a week now, but we haven't had the heart to tell him!" 

In the opening scene of the film, Lewis acknowledges a man in the crowd who came from a rival club. The two men signal back and forth to each other, and the visitor indicates that he'd like Lewis to perform at his club soon. During the concert at Caesar's Palace, Sinatra acknowledges and welcomes various distinguished guests in a more overt style. 

Also in the opening scene of The Joker is Wild, Lewis establishes himself as an expressive performer who uses large, sweeping gestures and no microphone. Throughout the film, Lewis rarely uses a mic, perhaps because he tends to be in intimate, small clubs where amplification is not needed. Sinatra, on the other hand, was the master of the microphone. 

Sinatra and Lewis both always had drinks in hand during their performances as well, although Lewis's drinking became a problem for him at various points in his career. From The Joker is Wild originates one of the most widely-quoted lines about drinking in American culture:

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."

Frank & The Playboy Image.

In The Tender Trap (1955), Sinatra's character Charlie Reader is the on-screen manifestation of the playboy lifestyle. In the opening scene, viewers find Charlie reclining on a couch as the woman laying on top of him feeds him grapes. As Charlie's childhood friend Joe arrives at the bachelor pad and announces that he needs a place to stay while he and his wife take a break, a parade of young women march in and out of Charlie's apartment. I'm interested in the reasons why these girls were so attracted to Charlie. I think that the playboy bachelor, simultaneously very adult and very childish, fulfills some maternal instincts in the girls attracted to him.

Charlie is successful and wealthy--his career as a talent agent puts him in contact with rising stars and the generous salary allows him to live a lavish, comfortable lifestyle. Financial success can be a draw for some women, particularly the "gold digger" types who just want to be wined, dined, and gifted, but the women who spend their time with Charlie don't make him do the work of wooing. Instead, the women who come to Charlie do so to care for him. They bring him dinner, clean up the apartment, and walk his dog. When Joe tells Charlie that the women "want what they all want...to feed you, caress you, burp you, sew monograms on your shirts," he is alluding directly to the intensely child-like side of the playboy persona. Perhaps that's just it--playBOYs revel in boyish, youthful states and attract the maternal care of young women.

Frank & XM.

I spent 14 hours in the car yesterday, roadtripping home to North Carolina from Notre Dame. Lucky for me, the car I was in had XM satellite radio. I spent the majority of the trip fiddling around with the dial, flicking through hundreds of channels of music and news and comedy shows. To my surprise, Frank Sinatra has his very own channel--#73. It's an XM/Sirius collaboration called "SIRIUSly Sinatra." Cue eye rolls.

I was so excited at the prospect of listening to Frank for the duration of my journey, but I quickly became disillusioned with the Sinatra station. It wasn't all Sinatra! The channel mostly played covers or songs that could be tangentially related to Sinatra, but weren't actually sung by him. A lot of the artists on the station were of the "Sinatra era" (which is, as we've learned, very broad)--some probably performed with Sinatra at some point, and many were his direct competitors. It only takes a few notes to recognize Frank's voice, and more often than not, it wasn't Frank I was hearing. I heard Bing Crosby, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Harry Connick Jr., Dean Martin, Rod Stewart (!), Shirley Temple, Nancy Sinatra, and Doris Day, but only a handful of songs actually sung by Old Blue Eyes himself. 

XM must have cheaped out and purchased a too-small selection of Sinatra music, because the other stations dedicated to particular artists didn't seem to be running out of material. Disappointed with the Sinatra channel, I kept turning back to the Elvis station (#18). Every time I tuned in, it was Elvis singing. I even caught The King covering Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," and it was awesome. Nobody but Elvis sings on the Elvis station. Same thing for the Bruce Springsteen station (#58). A few other artists "host" channels which play music of a particular genre, like Radio Margaritaville (#55) and B.B. King's Bluesville (#74).

If you're gonna make the claim that a channel is "SIRIUSly Sinatra," then own up to it! I want all Sinatra, all the time. 

In the mean time, a Sinatra channel on Pandora serves the same purpose as the XM channel. And it's free.

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.

Frank & James.

A few weeks ago, I posted about an article called "The Night Sinatra Happened," which was featured in Vanity Fair magazine. The author of the article, James Kaplan, is the author of a newly released book about Sinatra called "Frank--The Voice." Michiko Kakutani's reviews Kaplan's book in today's The New York Times. The article refers to well-respected writers and books in the Sinatriana canon, such that it is. My classmates might be familiar with Pete Hamill, author of "Why Sinatra Matters," and Will Friedwald, author of "Sinatra! The Song Is You."

I was surprised to learn that Kaplan's new book "ends before Sinatra's ascent to legendary status," ending just after Sinatra's 1953 Academy Award win for his role as Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Because the majority of Sinatra's dramatic (as opposed to musical) roles in films came after 1953, it seems that Kaplan's book would have to portray him mostly as a musician, largely ignoring his acting prowess.