Some Came Running
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Actor: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Leora Dana, Roy Engel, Shirley MacLaineBrand: MARTIN,DEAN
Cinematographer: William H. Daniels
Composer: Elmer Bernstein
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 137 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-05-13
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Actors: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Leora Dana, Roy Engel.
- Format: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC.
- Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0). Subtitles: English, French, Portuguese.
- Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only).
- Run Time: 137 minutes. Not Rated.
DVD Reviews of Some Came Running
DVD Review: The Prodigal Son Returns....
Summary: 5 Stars
To the untrained eye this 1958 Vincente Minnelli MGM melodrama looks like an excerise in Rat Pack sleaze, as it stars Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine at the summit of their ring-a-ding-ding hijinks. Don't be fooled -- this movie is absolutley dead serious, even as it flies as luridly over the top as the last act of a bel canto opera. Based on James (From Here to Eternity) Jones' unreadable novel, story tells of Dave Hersch (Sinatra), a just de-mobilized World War Two vet and novelist who returns to his small mid-Western hometown of Parkman, Ill. Hersch apparently was a troubled delinquent after being orphaned as a teen, and eventually his older brother (Arthur Kennedy) stuck him in an orphanage. Dave ran away, and this is his first time back in years. He had published some fiction with mixed success before the war, and now he's blocked and trying to figure out his next move. His brother, who is now owner of the local bank and a pillar of the community, is terrified Dave is a)out for some kind of revenge and b)will do something to bring scandal down on his good name. Parkman, incidentally, is the kind of white-picket fence churchgoing place where every pillar of the community family man harbors a drinking problem, a mistress, and teenage kids who are veering towards delinquency.
As the older brother correctly feared, Dave has grown up to be a tough, cynical, hard-drinking womanizer who trouble usually follows, and as soon as he arrives in pastoral Parkman, he gravitates to the Wrong Side of the Tracks, sleazy downtown taverns where professional gambler 'Bama Dillard (Dino) hold court, surrounded by the local working-girls (MacLaine being the most outrageously trashy and dumb -- but with a heart of gold and an indescribable wardrobe). Dave spends his nights drowning in dissolute behavior with the Pack, and his days trying to hammer out a novel, under the watchful eye of the frigid yet beautiful local patroness of the arts (Martha Hyer), who sees in Dave a new Thomas Wolfe. The suspicion soon arises that Dave has only started writing again to see if he can meet the challenge of getting the 40-year old virgin into bed.
It is not long before the three worlds Dave attempts to integrate -- the country club world of his brother, Dino's sleazy dives, and Hyer's isolated writer's workshop/mansion/sexless life of the mind -- create only conflicts that messes up everyone in the town of Parkman.
Dave's conflict between the life of the artist and his attraction to the working class lower depths pre-figures Jack Nicholson's similar conflict in Five Easy Pieces over a decade later.
Except this isn't the ersatz Antonioni-world of Pieces; this is a full-blown technicolor melodrama with a fabulous Elmer Bernstein score, that puts the "opera" back in soap opera. Best described as somewhere between Peyton Place and Blue Velvet, Some Came Running belongs to the melodrama subgenre of "Let's look beneath the placid suburban surface and see what maggots crawl out." A very prevalent theme in '50's cinema (see the works of Douglas Sirk), I believe this genre was the descendant of '40's noir, as it allowed subversive film-makers to illustrate the moral and sexual hypocracies of our "straightest" communities and citizens, thus prefiguring 1960's concerns in the supposedly placid Eisenhower era. "Some Came Running" is of particular interest in that it deploys the sleazy mores and manners of the town's underclass to critique the respectable citizens of Parkman.
Director Minelli, known for his studio-bound, arty musicals, made the decision to shoot on location in a small Indiana town; yet the movie's deranged lighting, elaborate set-dressing and color palette(the bars are eyeball searing infernal visions in red and green neon reminiscent of the joint in Fire Walk With Me),over-the-top performances and wall-to-wall music defeat naturalism. While dramatically a tad aimless (the book its based on is as long as War & Peace, no joke)"Some Came Running" is perhaps the most visually sumptuous of '50's melodramas -- Visconti comes to the Midwest. And the climax -- a nearly wordless dance of death at a garish night-time carnival -- is a classic Minelli set-piece, an inversion of his trademark musical numbers, representing a nightmare rather than a dream. Where Minnelli's first great musical, "Meet Me in St. Louis," lyrically waxed nostaligic about midwestern small town virtues, "Some Came Running" luridly lingers over midwestern smalltown vices without a hint of nostalgia or sentiment.
This is a fascinating period piece, doubly interesting to see the aesthete Minelli wallow in sleaze. And Frank and Dino turn in solid in-character performances, and don't sing a note. MacLaine's trashy B-Girl, who loves Dave unconditionally even as he treats her like a doormat, is both bravely over-the-top and very poignant, the most memorable of the gallery of prostitutes she typically played in her early career.
Finally, if you're a fan of 50's -early '60's long-take,Cinemascope/Technicolor mise-en-scene, all eye-popping color, oddball camera angles, and cluttered compositions, this is really one of the finest examples, the kind of thing that routinely sent Jean-Luc Godard into raptures when he was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema. It looks like a Renaissance fresco, a style that has been lost in our post-TV/CGI stylistic era.
Description of Some Came Running
After a round of partying he can?t remember, World War II veteran Dave Hirsh is placed on a bus headed for the last place he?d choose: Parkman, Indiana, the hometown Hirsh hasn't seen in well over a decade. Frank Sinatra plays Hirsh, whose arrival in Parkman brings small-town hypocrisy to the unforgiving light of day in this character-driven tale directed by Vincente Minnelli and based on a novel by James Jones (whose From Here to Eternity had led to Sinatra?s 1953 Oscar). In his first screen pairing with Sinatra, Dean Martin plays a sharp-witted cardsharp. And Shirley MacLaine earned one of the movie's five Academy AwardŌ nominations as the good-hearted floozie with a potentially fatal attraction to Hirsh.Bestsellers in DVD
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