Word: sinatras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film takes Sinatra from his childhood days in New Jersey through his back-from-retirement concert at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Most of the familiar movie-bio cliches are here -- young Frank argues with skeptical parents over his show-biz dreams ("I can do this! I can be someone!") -- but so is a lot of flavorful, crisply told detail. The young singer goes on the road as part of a quartet put together by Major Bowes; picks up work in a club where he has to wheel his own piano accompanist around the room; is discovered by bandleader Harry...
...Sinatra is best in these climbing-to-the-top scenes, and in its portrayal of Sinatra's career slump in the late '40s, when record sales dipped, his marriage crumbled and he even made a botched suicide attempt. His marital infidelities get ample attention, particularly his stormy affair with Ava Gardner (Marcia Gay Harden). Along the way, he is portrayed as an egotistic hothead with a politically correct tint: when a hotel clerk tries to deny a room to black band member Sy Oliver, Sinatra bullies the fellow into turning over...
...movie is silliest when show-biz celebrities parade on and off the stage as if it were Impressionists Night at the Improv. Sinatra gets marital advice from Humphrey Bogart, rushes to Sammy Davis Jr.'s bedside after his car accident and cavorts with the Rat Pack in a steam room at the Sands Hotel. The scenes between Sinatra and the Kennedy family are the phoniest of all, but they do open up the touchy subject of Sinatra's mob links. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Joe Kennedy asks Sinatra for help with "our friends in Chicago who control the unions...
When the music stops, Sinatra sags, but luckily that isn't very often. Casnoff lip-synchs more than 20 classic Sinatra recordings, from early Big Band numbers to '60s hits like That's Life. Director James Sadwith uses the music shrewdly and liberally, often as background for narrative montages (You Make Me Feel So Young accompanies his courtship of Mia Farrow). It's the most lavishly entertaining TV movie of the year...
...ended not with a bang but a whimper -- Dan Quayle whimpering about Murphy Brown, Hollywood and family values. It began with Hollywood values installed on the Potomac -- Frank Sinatra, that champion of family virtue, staging an Inauguration for his old friends Ronald, Jane Wyman's ex-husband, and Nancy, the goddaughter of a famous lesbian (the silent-screen star Alla Nazimova). We have all heard that revolutions devour their own, but how could the Reagan Revolution, of all things, end in a war against Hollywood...