On Screen: Always the Hoboken Kid

Frank Sinatra’s film and television career spanned more than 50 years, from his early appearances as a vocalist in two short subjects with the Dorsey Band in 1941 and ’42 to his MTV duets with Bono and other rock artists in 1992.

He made his acting debut in 1943 in the musical “Higher and Higher.” In this RKO confection, of which the trade paper Variety noted, “He at least gets in no one’s way,” Sinatra played a society boy-next-door type, the very opposite image from the underdog roles that would bring him his greatest accolades and with which he would sustain the rest of his acting career.

It seemed, at first, as if he would repeat the career trajectory of other exploitable pop idols, like Fanny Brice, Al Jolson and Rudy Vallee, who, coming to Hollywood, appeared in light-hearted fare created essentially to capitalize on their vocal prowess and avid following. “It Happened in Brooklyn,” in which he performed a memorable duet with Jimmy Durante, and “The Kissing Bandit” (1948), perhaps Sinatra’s movie nadir, seemed to confirm that Sinatra would be yet another singer to repeat this history.

But a professional and personal tailspin in the early part of the 1950s--he was dropped by his record label Columbia in December 1952 because his style of crooning seemed out of sync with current tastes--seemed to bring out the best in the tenacious singer. Using the hardships absorbed in his professional and personal life, he set out to capture what he knew would be the role of a lifetime, that of Angelo Maggio in the film version of James Jones’ “From Here to Eternity.”

But no one wanted Sinatra. After being forced in November 1952 to screen test for the part, Sinatra received it only after actor Eli Wallach dropped out of the picture. It was not until January 1953 that the part of Angelo Maggio was his, for the paltry salary of $8,000. His performance as a good-natured wise guy, a loner underdog picked on by the psychopathic sergeant of Ernest Borgnine, seemed to flow from a natural source within the performer. For his performance Sinatra won the Academy Award for best supporting actor, beating Jack Palance, who was favored for his performance as the screen’s most evil gunslinger in “Shane.” A dazed Sinatra, unable to believe his reversal of fortune, walked around Beverly Hills with his statuette until he was stopped by a policeman who asked him where he got the Oscar.

The award signaled a full-scale rebirth of his singing and movie careers. But the moment also marked a reassessment of his commitment to acting. Maggio was followed by his role in Lewis Allen’s “Suddenly” (1954), in which Sinatra played a cold-blooded assassin whose plot to shoot the president as his train passes through a small California town is foiled by a sheriff played by Sterling Hayden.

In 1955, he turned in strong performances as Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls,” holding his own with Marlon Brando’s Sky Masterson. That same year he was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of a drug-addicted musician in Otto Preminger’s “The Man With the Golden Arm.” Facing particularly strong competition (his fellow nominees included Spencer Tracy, James Dean and James Cagney), Sinatra lost to an even bigger outsider: Borgnine, his former screen nemesis from “Eternity,” for his performance in “Marty.”

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From the mid-’50s on, Sinatra alternated between musical froth like “High Society” and serious parts. If he was forgettable in “Johnny Concho” (1956) or seemed to be dissipating his energy by doing cameos in high-budgeted but lightweight fare like “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1956), he was memorable in “The Joker Is Wild,” the biopic of singer Joe E. Lewis, whose career seemed ruined when his vocal cords were slashed by the mob.

He was strong again in Vincente Minnelli’s “Some Came Running,” which teamed him with Rat Pack cronies Shirley MacLaine and Dean Martin, and in Frank Capra’s “A Hole in the Head.”

In each film, he played a variation on a man whose grasp exceeded his reach but who was redeemed not by success or fame but by the ordinary virtue of love or family. It was a script wildly at odds with the now much-chronicled narrative of his personal life, but audiences seemed to believe the wealthy and extraordinary “chairman of the board” when he played an ordinary soul beset by troubles.

Sinatra was known to be a temperamental, intuitive film actor. On the set of “A Hole in the Head,” his no-rehearsal instinctive style ran head-on into the old-pro studio style of another ethnic tough guy, Edward G. Robinson. Though the two had to be physically separated at one moment, the end seemed worth it. The rapport between Robinson’s straight-laced older brother and Sinatra’s down-and-out swinger is one of the most poignantly etched and believable pairings in Hollywood history.

In 1962, Sinatra turned in what many consider his greatest performance, that of a brainwashed Korean War veteran in the chilling “The Manchurian Candidate.” Initially received with mixed critical results, the film--and Sinatra’s performance--were only enhanced upon its re-release in 1987.

The film was Sinatra’s last attempt to reach beyond what was becoming an increasingly limited repertoire and a reliance on an established tough-guy star image. From self-indulgent Rat Pack home movies like “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (which he co-produced) to a series of tough urban detective films like 1967’s “Tony Rome,” the man whose greatest ability seemed to be the gift of reinventing his career in each decade seemed, on the screen, to be repeating himself.

His last leading role was as a detective in 1980’s “The First Deadly Sin.” Though moviegoers heard his voice in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), Sinatra’s film career was essentially through by the end of the 1970s.

In Hollywood’s world of dry-cleaned and almost generic ethnicity, Sinatra’s screen presence represented a complicated and defiant wish of many Americans in a cinema and a nation whose main myth was assimilation and mainstreaming. Jewish leading men Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, Danny Kaye and other “ethnic” stars toned down their specific roots and played some vague urban type.

Their producers expected, and, to a certain extent, the actors themselves acceded in leaving their ethnicity behind when they arrived in Hollywood. Not Sinatra. Never Sinatra. In fact, of this group, only Sinatra retained his real name.

It was not just in his roles, the seemingly endless stream of kids-from-Brooklyn--in or out of sailor suits--that Sinatra remained who he was. It was evident and absolutely readable in his very attitude, his diction and his accent. In Sinatra’s presentation of a movie self, he was always the Italian kid from Hoboken--a person from the neighborhood, a real place, not a Hollywood sound stage.

His attitude about his ethnicity also showed in his refusal to be controlled. It was these two poses in conjunction--ethnicity, combined with pugnacity--that made him very, very American and tremendously compelling, on screen and off.

George Custen writes about popular culture and American film. His most recent book is “Twentieth Century Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood” (Basic Books, 1997).