The Sound of Sinatra’s Hollywood Years

Like a newly discovered painting by Picasso or an unpublished manuscript by Hemingway, a previously overlooked recording by Frank Sinatra instantly piques the curiosity of fans around the world.

For even though Sinatra’s art has been copiously documented in several excellent boxed sets and in pristine CD reissues of his classic albums on Capitol and Reprise, the Sinatra devotee’s appetite for still more fresh material only increases with the passage of time.

This insatiable desire for more music by Sinatra--who died in 1998, at age 82--has inspired archivists to dig deep into recording-studio vaults and collectors’ personal collections, where they recently have found enough to fill a plushly packaged, beautifully annotated new six-CD boxed set aptly titled “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” (on Reprise/Turner Classic Movies Music, $119.98 suggested retail price).

Granted, most of the 160 tracks are not exactly unknown, since Sinatra cut them for films that were released between 1940 and 1964 and have been seen by millions on TV, video and DVD. Everyone of a certain age knows how Sinatra sounded singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “I Could Write a Book” in “Pal Joey” (1957), which in retrospect might be considered the first great music video.

Yet this trove of music, spanning the quaintly crooned “Dolores” from the film “Las Vegas Nights” (on which Sinatra appeared uncredited in 1941) to the rip-roaring “My Kind of Town” from “Robin and the 7 Hoods” (1964), adds significantly to Sinatra’s already bulging discography, if only because most never have been available as stand-alone recordings.

Brought together, these performances--some classic, some lightly entertaining, some disposable--trace the arc of a vastly influential film-music career, in the process documenting Sinatra’s transformation from early ‘40s crooner to late ‘40s swinger to profound ‘50s balladeer. And though many facets of Sinatra’s music never surfaced on film or on this boxed set--particularly his most expressionistic ballads of the late ‘50s and his bossa nova explorations of the ‘60s--”Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” gives the uninitiated enough indelible music to stir an interest to learn more.

One hastens to note, however, that the cuts on “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” do not match the superior sound quality of the music on his Capitol and Reprise boxed sets, nor were they intended to. Above all, this was music designed for film and was, therefore, sonically somewhat diminished by the technical limitations of the moviemaking process in an earlier era.

Moreover, everything known about Sinatra’s life and career suggests that he poured most of his artistic energies into his studio recordings, demanding nothing but the best in orchestrations, instrumentalists, microphones and, most important, himself. When it came to recording tunes for film, on the other hand, Sinatra rarely lingered over his work, preferring to make it sound quick, easy and spontaneous.

Yet despite Sinatra’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward filmmaking and the often clumsy nature of the film-recording process, the man managed to create some definitive musical performances for celluloid, as the new boxed set shows.

Though he recorded Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” several times during his career, his version for the forgettable film “Reveille With Beverly” (1943) proves strikingly slow and rapturous. The degree of control, subtlety and tonal shading he brings to “That Old Black Magic,” from “Meet Danny Wilson” (1952), documents Sinatra’s interpretive achievements near their pinnacle.

And then there are the lost gems. On “The Man With the Golden Arm,” which Sinatra never sang in the 1956 film of the same name and inexplicably never was released to coincide with the film, his steeped-in-blue vocals are answered by crying jazz horns. And though Sinatra did not sing “To Love and Be Loved” in “Some Came Running” (1958), the song adds crisp meaning to an otherwise moody, murky film about postwar alienation and disillusionment.

But “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” has lighter moments, too, especially in the singer’s effervescent duets with Gene Kelly and Jimmy Durante, two of the few Hollywood legends who could hold their own against Ol’ Blue Eyes.

If there’s one exasperating omission here, it’s the numbers Sinatra recorded for “Carousel,” in which he was to star as Billy Bigelow--until he abruptly quit the set and the production (experts disagree on the reasons).

Some unspecified contractual restrictions prevented the inclusion of those tracks in this set, and it’s a good bet that the producers of “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” were as frustrated by that gap as Sinatra aficionados surely will be.

Nevertheless, this rich boxed set sheds light on a subject that never ceases to fascinate listeners.

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Howard Reich is arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.