Frank Sinatra plays a two-fisted tough guy, in 1946 home from the war, who visits his hectoring, moralizing brother, a role Arthur Kennedy pioneered in "Champion" and "The Man From Laramie." After being spurned by high-toned, bourgeois teacher Martha Hyer, who, like any woman of the 1950s that had not started producing a brood of future warriors, appears to be "frigid," Frank goes to Smitty's Tavern, where easy, beautiful, lower class Shirley MacLaine instantly falls in love with him. When Kennedy is rejected by his wife, formidable Leora Dana, who has had all the children she's going to have, he goes after the "girl" in his office, pretty Nancy Gates. When his teenaged daughter, Betty Lou Keim sees this, she is shocked into disillusionment, gets drunk and goes on a "date" with hapless, middle-aged Don Haggerty, until our swaggering hero runs him off, thus rescuing the distressed maiden. Frank is brutal in his mistreatment of "fallen" Shirley, but in the end, she can't get "enough," has her own lesson to teach and proves her love. All this happens before Hugh M. Hefner's 1960s "Sexual Revolution." The cinematography, music and direction are all very good and the final scene in the amusement park is as memorable for the career of Vincente Minelli as the fun house shootout in "The Lady From Shanghai," for Orson Welles, although technically far less challenging.
Review of Some Came Running
