The Man With the Golden Arm Highlights Sinatra's Acting Chops

 

Preminger wouldn't allow anyone to replace the above design

 

 

 

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955)

Directed by Otto Preminger

United Artists, 119 minutes, Not-rated and Not-approved

★★★

 

Younger readers might not know that crooner Frank Sinatra was also a pretty good actor. He was the star of The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 movie directed by Otto Preminger. Perhaps only a director with the gravitas and moxie of Preminger could have made it. It was based upon a 1949 novel by Nelson Algren, and the first American film of the sound era to deal with heroin addiction.

 

The movie rights to Algren’s book were sold to John Garfield in 1949, who planned to star in it. The first script was rejected by the Movie Production Code Authority (MPCA) and the Catholic League of Decency (CLD). Garfield died in 1952, and when filming started as “An Otto Preminger Production,” Algren sued based his 1949 contract promising he’d get a large percentage of the royalties. (Algren ran out of money and dropped his suit.) Preminger began to shoot before the script got MCPA or CLD approval, which were not forthcoming. Preminger simply ignored them. Moreover, the script was sent to both Sinatra and Marlon Brando; Sinatra agreed almost immediately as he was still angry that Brando got the lead in On the Waterfront.

 

Sinatra played the role of Frankie Machine, an addict recently released from a federal narcotics farm in Kentucky. The old crowd welcomes him back to Chicago, including Sparrow (Arnold Stang), an oddball–perhaps mentally slow– who makes his living selling street dogs, even if he has to put shoe polish on canines for those who want a “black” dog. Sparrow, in turn, follows Frankie around like a puppy. In lockup, Frankie learned to play the drums and harbors dreams of landing a place in a big band jazz outfit. He also insists that he’s clean and wants no part of drugs, no matter how often street provider Zero Schwiefka (Robert Strauss) offers, or Frankie’s wheelchair-bound wife “Zosh” Sophia (Eleanor Parker) begs him to help her relieve her pain. She too clings to him like glue and, though he doesn’t love her, he feels beholden as she was injured in an auto accident when Frankie was driving while drunk.

 

Zero also wants Frankie to “deal” for him, by which is meant a card dealer for Schwiefka’s all-night, high-stakes poker games. Frank is also burning the midnight oil pursuing Molly Novotny, a stripper and escort. She was Frank’s flame before he married Zosh out of guilt. Band tryouts further exhaust Frankie and Schwiefka is only too happy to stick a needle in his arm to give him a boost or bail him out when he’s pinched in a suit stolen for him by Sparrow.

 

Preminger’s Chicago bears resemblance to the slums of Hoboken in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront–gritty, filled with temptation, and easy-to-fall. As Zosh guilt-trips Frankie to the point where he’s smothered by her, he retreats to Molly’s first-floor flat and rekindles their romance. There’s a lot about Zosh that’s fishy, even as Frankie spirals downward into new addiction. Why, for example, has “Nifty Louie” Fomorowski (Darren McGavin) been hanging around with Zosh? Even as he becomes more and more dependent on a fix, Frank knows the wheels are about to fly off for him, though he’s on the eve of realizing his dream. When he tries to bum fix money from Molly, she proposes a different solution; she will help him if he agrees to go cold turkey. If not, she will never see him again.

 

The Man with the Golden Arm implies that the golden arm is Frankie’s drumming riffs, but we all know that the real reference is to injecting heroin and/or morphine. By today’s standard, the film is predictable and melodramatic, but Sinatra is terrific in it. His was one of the most extended and harrowing depictions of going cold turkey in cinematic history. Call it also a film with an A-level cast: Sinatra, Novak, McGavin, and Strauss were all big stars, even if the eccentric Stang stole a few scenes. The film didn’t do as well as On the Waterfront, but it did get three Oscar nominations and was added to the National Film Registry. The jazz soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein (not related to Leonard) was big hit, as was Saul Bass’s poster design.

 

Rob Weir