I’ve seen From Here to Eternity a couple times, and despite the fact Montgomery Clift comes across more creepy than romantic, it’s a fine movie. The movie, based on a novel by author James Jones, was such a huge hit that MGM immediately got the rights to another of Jones’s books and secured Frank Sinatra, fresh off his Oscar win for the aforementioned From Here to Eternity, to play the lead.
That would be Some Came Running, and it’s a very different kind of movie from the previous film.
Dave Hirsh (Sinatra) is a soldier and author returning to his hometown after a long time away. He brought with him a young woman named Ginny (Shirley MacLaine) who he may have had a fling with, but Dave’s only really interested in her when he’s drunk. Why is he coming home? He seems to have some unfinished business with his brother Frank (Arthur Kennedy). Frank married a wealthy woman named Agnes (Leora Davis), and the two are more interested in their social standing. It doesn’t help that Agnes hates Dave and when the two got married, had put Dave away in a charity boarding school rather than take care of him in their home. He hasn’t been home in 16 years. Frank does try to make amends a little, if only for the sake of his public image, but it’s clear that Dave’s reputation and vices won’t ever sit well with Agnes, and Frank can’t seem to understand that Dave’s problems have more to do with Dave and are not just a reflection on Frank.
It doesn’t help that Dave falls in with gambler Bama (Dean Martin), but Dave isn’t really that bad a guy. He wants to be a good uncle to Frank’s daughter Dawn, and he does attempt to romance a creative writing instructor Frank and Agnes introduced him to who helps him with his writing. Ginny can’t quite take a hint and go home, and Bama isn’t the best person to hang out with, but Dave is clearly not the man his brother and sister-in-law thinks he is, and they don’t seem to be as good as they think they are either. However, if anything, this movie is about how Dave’s decisions, often done while drunk, may keep coming back to haunt him just as much as his brother’s past treatment is something Dave can’t quite forgive or forget.
There’s a lot to like about this movie, even if I think MacLaine’s character (for which she got her first Oscar nomination) is more obnoxious and a crude stereotype of a certain kind of woman. If this movie were a comedy, she’d be comedically dumb as the prototype for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, but there isn’t much funny about Some Came Running. Apparently, it was during the making of this movie that Sinatra, Martin, and MacLaine all became lifelong friends, and they do have an easy rapport. But it still isn’t a comedy. I somehow think much of this movie would have worked better as a comedy.
That said, it’s still a well-constructed tragic drama, with an ending changed on Sinatra’s suggestion. The basic suggestion seems to be there is more honor in hard-partying Dave and lowlife gambler Bama than there ever would be in the likes of Frank and Agnes. That isn’t a hard and fast rule: Dave’s initial love interest Gwen is not a bad person in the slightest, only really breaking things off with Dave when it looks like he’s screwing around with other women behind her back (he actually isn’t, but Ginny doesn’t exactly make the best of character witnesses), and the performances, particularly from Sinatra, are first class. Maybe it’s just that the sort of social climbing seen in the movie, even if it comes from more antagonistic characters like Agnes and Frank, doesn’t really work for me as a motivation. It’s not something that appears too often in other movies, and it is perhaps the one really clumsy element in the entire film as far as I was concerned.
Grade: B+
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