Word: sinatras
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...SHOW: SINATRA...
...Sinatra, a five-hour CBS mini-series about the pop-music legend, sounded unpromising from the get-go. The Chairman of the Board's life story has been too public and too troubling -- fights with reporters, alleged Mafia ties, stories of boorish behavior -- to be much good as myth, and network TV doesn't have the stomach for a real expose. Especially not in a movie produced by Sinatra's own daughter Tina...
Well, she did it her way, and the result is far from a disgrace. The singer's controversial life gets surprisingly tough-minded and balanced treatment. Philip Casnoff, who reproduces the young Sinatra's lean, hollow- cheeked look without blatant mimicry, creates a convincing, full-blooded portrait. And in the end, we have the music...
...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...