Jonathan Yardley on 'Sinatra in Hollywood'

SINATRA IN HOLLYWOOD

By Tom Santopietro

St. Martin's. 530 pp. $29.95

The chairmanship of Frank Sinatra's fan club, an exalted position the occupancy of which seems to be in an eternal state of flux, for the moment clearly belongs to Tom Santopietro, who works in the New York theater but moonlights as biographer and admirer of singers who also act. Having previously focused his attention on Doris Day and Barbra Streisand, he now turns to Sinatra, for whom his admiration seems to know no limits:

"As Katharine Hepburn said of herself, 'Whatever it is, I've got it.' So, too, did Frank Sinatra the film actor, over an incredible fifty-four-year run of full-length motion pictures ranging from 1941 through 1995. The greatest male pop singer in the history of America, he had evolved from a pleasant lightweight performer on film to the most versatile male presence in movies, equally at home in a first-class musical such as On the Town or in the heaviest of dramas, like The Man with the Golden Arm. In his seventy-one feature film appearances, Frank Sinatra crafted a body of work unparalleled in American film history in its versatility. No other actor in Hollywood history had ever ranged so widely and so believably over such a long period of time. He may have made quite a few movies of little or no discernible merit, but as director George Sidney flatly declared: 'There were no heights he couldn't reach.' "

Santopietro's enthusiasm is admirable, but no one who knows Sinatra's films is likely to find it infectious or persuasive. Yes, Sinatra did appear in a remarkable variety of movies and roles, and occasionally -- especially in "On the Town," "From Here to Eternity," "Suddenly" and "The Manchurian Candidate" -- he was very good, but of those 71 movies, these four are the only ones likely to be of much lasting interest. Unlike most actors, who come to the movies without reputations and are able to shape their cinematic identities over time, Sinatra came to Hollywood a full-blown celebrity, one of the most recognizable people in the country if not the planet, and he spent the rest of his movie career playing himself, which is to say that his movies may be varied in subject, mood and theme, but the character whom Sinatra plays in them is always Frank Sinatra.

This is in stark contrast to other prominent male actors who were more or less contemporaneous with Sinatra: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, to name four who come immediately to mind, not to mention an even larger contingent of Brits, from Alec Guinness to John Gielgud to Sean Connery to Michael Caine to James Mason. It is in the nature of movies that the audience rarely if ever completely loses sight of the real person who is the actor up there on the screen, but some actors are able to lose themselves in their characters in ways that Sinatra rarely could. This is due partly to the huge identity he had achieved outside the movies and partly to complete self-absorption, but it limits his film performances in ways that Santopietro only occasionally acknowledges.

Sinatra came to the movies, of course, because by 1941 he was the idol of countless teen-aged girls -- known in those distant days as "bobby-soxers," for the short socks that were part of their obligatory uniform -- as a result of his singing, first with Harry James's big band, then with Tommy Dorsey's, then on his own. Few American musical performers have enjoyed the kind of out-of-control celebrity that was his for a few years, and it was a matter of course that Hollywood would come calling, just as a decade and a half later it came calling for Elvis Presley. He made 10 movies between 1935 and 1945, but did not distinguish himself until the release that same year of "Anchors Aweigh," a good-natured wartime diversion in which he had the good fortune to be paired with Gene Kelly, who taught him a great deal about movie acting generally and dancing specifically. Interestingly, Sinatra is nowhere to be found in the movie's most famous and durable scene, a four-minute sequence in which Kelly dances with the cartoon mouse, Jerry; the scene was re-introduced to moviegoers 30 years later in "That's Entertainment!" and proved to have lost none its luster.

Sinatra made two more notable musicals, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "On the Town," both of which were released in 1949 and in both of which Kelly also appeared. Then Sinatra went into what appeared to be terminal decline, in part because of bad publicity attendant to his famously tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner, in larger part because everything seemed to be falling apart; he "faced a future with no record company, no agent, no movie studio contract, and a back-tax bill of nearly a hundred thousand dollars." The country's tastes in popular music were beginning to change. Sinatra's silken, intimate style was falling out of favor and rock and roll was dimly visible on the horizon. Then, as every movie fan (and/or Sinatra fan) knows, in 1953 Sinatra somehow managed to persuade Harry Cohn at Columbia to let him play Angelo Maggio in the studio's adaptation of James Jones's bestselling novel From Here to Eternity. His performance turned out to be brilliant, and he won an Academy Award for it.

He was back, both as movie star and as singer. The albums he recorded in the 1950s for Capitol Records, accompanied by Nelson Riddle, are absolutely extraordinary; it is no exaggeration to say that these 318 tracks may well be the finest ever made by an American pop singer, and they are certain to last far longer than even the best of his movies. He stayed on top from then until his death in 1998. During the 1950s and '60s he made several worthwhile films -- the aforementioned along with "The Man with the Golden Arm," "High Society," "The Joker Is Wild" and "Von Ryan's Express" -- but by as early as 1960 "laziness would now be exhibited with increasing frequency," as Santopietro quite awkwardly puts it. He continues:

"It was the start of personality acting as opposed to acting on film as a craft, and anyone doubting the shift need only take a look at Marriage on the Rocks, Assault on a Queen, and Dirty Dingus Magee. The key point to remember is that it wasn't a result of Sinatra's not caring about his movies. Rather, as his persona cast a larger and larger shadow over the landscape of American pop culture, his demeanor on set changed from impatient to short-tempered. If Frank felt one take was enough, then everybody else needed to see it that way as well. It was Sinatra's way or the highway."

As that indicates, Santopietro does not hesitate to pan the many bad movies that Sinatra made -- not merely the three mentioned, but also "The Kissing Bandit," "Double Dynamite," "Not As a Stranger," "The Pride and the Passion" and "Never So Few," for starters -- yet he is inexplicably forgiving about the two musicals in which Sinatra appeared in the 1950s, "Guys and Dolls" and "Pal Joey." As a 20-year veteran of Broadway, Santopietro surely knows that the filmed versions of these two classic stage musicals were pathetic bowdlerizations of the originals. In both, Sinatra deserves credit for trying, but the films themselves are so bad that no singer or actor could rescue them.

Santopietro's eagerness to give Sinatra the benefit of the doubt at just about every turn is mildly appealing, but it's difficult to imagine that Sinatra in Hollywood will be of interest to anyone except the most incurably addicted Sinatraholic. His prose has little grace, and none at all when he lapses into a mannered breeziness that is meant, one supposes, to echo Sinatra's own voice; thus we must suffer through the likes of "Required to fake being drunk, his acting of 'acting' inebriated is, well, sorta, kinda okay," and "Well, what the hell," and "Sinatra may have been through with starring roles on the big screen, but he sure as hell was not about to retire, not by a long shot." Et cetera.

A more serious problem is that Santopietro insists on recapitulating, in excruciating detail, the plots of every single movie in which Sinatra appears. These précis are tiresome in the extreme and add nothing to the reader's understanding or appreciation of Sinatra's acting career. Like biographies of sports figures in which every game and every play is recounted, Sinatra in Hollywood ultimately collapses under the weight of its own triviality. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.