In the early 1950s, Frank Sinatra was primarily regarded as a has-been with anger-management issues and a voice that had gone south.
And then he played Maggio in “From Here to Eternity,” won his Oscar, and everybody sat up and paid attention again. Sinatra followed that with a series of the most emotionally ravaging albums ever made, but the comeback was started by acting, not music.
But he was never taken seriously as an actor, partly because he only occasionally seemed to take acting seriously.
“My father didn’t have the formal acting training that his peers had,” points out Tina Sinatra, his youngest daughter. “Most of the people he worked with originated from theater, and I don’t know if he felt he had the acting prowess to redo an emotional scene over and over again.”
But a reassessment of Sinatra’s film legacy may be about to start. To mark Wednesday’s 10-year anniversary of Sinatra’s death, Warners is releasing five DVD sets covering 22 titles, including two five-disc sets.
Included are such seminal Sinatra films as “The Man With the Golden Arm” and “Some Came Running,” as well as lighter fare: “The Tender Trap,” “Higher and Higher” and the awful “The Kissing Bandit,” the film that began his fall from grace.
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Five great Sinatra movies
‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962): A very good performance and a great movie that always seems perpetually modern in its disillusion and evocation of political and personal betrayal.
‘From Here to Eternity’ (1953): Sometime, someone in Hollywood might have made a better adaptation of a good novel, but I haven’t seen it. Beyond the famous love scene on the beach, it offers Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Sinatra, a complicated story set against the backdrop of Pearl Harbor, and it’s over in two hours. Top that.
‘Some Came Running’ (1958): Sinatra keeps it real amid the stylish theatrics of Vincente Minnelli.
‘The Man With the Golden Arm’ (1955): Sinatra keeps it real amid the not-so-stylish theatrics of Otto Preminger.
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‘On the Town’ (1949): Watching Sinatra play sexual panic kills me. And the music’s not bad, either, even if they did cut too many songs from the Broadway show.