The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (388 page)

He had spent much of his youth in Anchorage, Alaska, before entering the University of Oregon. On graduating, he went into movie publicity, thence to the Paramount of Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, where he rose to be president of production by 1981; one of his biggest coups at Paramount was
An Officer and a Gentleman
(82, Taylor Hackford)—he had an odd taste for militaristic codes. By 1983, he was off on his own in partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, and they together developed a special kind of physically destructive movie that is almost entirely without resonance.

His great works as producer or executive producer are
Flashdance
(83, Adrian Lyne);
Beverly Hills Cop
(84, Martin Brest);
Thief of Hearts
(84, Douglas Day Stewart);
Top Gun
(96, Tony Scott);
Beverly Hills Cop II
(87, Scott);
Days of Thunder
(90, Scott);
The Ref
(94, Ted Demme), his most worthwhile film;
Bad Boys
(95, Michael Bay);
Crimson Tide
(95, Scott);
Dangerous Minds
(95, John N. Smith);
The Rock
(96, Bay).

What else can one say about a self-declared Genghis Khan of the popular imagination than that Tony Scott and Michael Bay were his favored instruments?

Frank Sinatra
(1915–98), b. Hoboken, New Jersey
Although a regular screen performer for twenty-five years, during which he had two distinct triumphs as a popular singer—one as a band crooner, the other as the first great exponent of the long-playing record—Sinatra’s film work has only a few successes amid many indifferent and ill-chosen projects. The surly charm of the runt’s ugliness made him too broody, too lazy, or too bored to pick films carefully or to attend to them with due seriousness. The extraordinary flair for dramatic ballads and the complete assurance with a live audience have all too seldom shown themselves on the screen. Perhaps the “master” always preferred immediate reassurance.

There are three phases to Sinatra’s film career. He began as a singer with the Tommy Dorsey band in
Las Vegas Nights
(41, Ralph Murphy) and
Ship Ahoy
(42, Edward Buzzell). His great following led to a contract with MGM, where he appeared singing, occasionally dancing, and projecting a scrawny soulfulness in
Higher and Higher
(43, Tim Whelan);
Step Lively
(44, Whelan);
Anchors Aweigh
(45, George Sidney);
It Happened in Brooklyn
(46, Richard Whorf); singing “Ol’ Man River” in a white suit in
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Whorf);
The Kissing Bandit
(48, Laslo Benedek);
The Miracle of the Bells
(48, Irving Pichel);
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
(49, Busby Berkeley); and
On the Town
(49, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly). In none of these did he make a lasting personal contribution to the history of the musical.

By then, his whole career was in decline. He left MGM and made
Meet Danny Wilson
(51, Joseph Pevney) at Universal. He lost a recording contract and his marriage to Ava Gardner foundered. At last, he seemed as vulnerable as he had looked. The total crisis in his life was overcome with his portrayal of Maggio in
From Here to Eternity
(53, Fred Zinnemann). Although it won the supporting Oscar, the performance is superficial. But it changed the public image of Sinatra and allowed him to mix musicals and acting. Thereafter he had the earned wryness of a lowlife victim.

Having signed with Capitol and met arranger Nelson Riddle, his records found a new popularity, and he was confident enough to spend the next five years active in Hollywood. More than that, he experimented. Most successfully, in comedy with songs he perfected the character of a moody, softhearted womanizer:
Young at Heart
(54, Gordon Douglas), which is in the line of those films in which John Garfield is the grit in a household of fond women;
The Tender Trap
(55, Charles Walters); as Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
(55, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
High Society
(56, Walters); and
Pal Joey
(57, George Sidney). These are the films that made the largest screen contribution to Sinatra’s image of offhand glamour.

But in the same period he set up two rather adventurous movies:
Suddenly
(54, Lewis Allen), in which he is a would-be presidential assassin, indulging tough-guy fantasies and very credibly malicious; and a coward in
Johnny Concho
(55, Don McGuire). They are ambitious but strained films, better than the grandiose silliness of
Not as a Stranger
(55, Stanley Kramer) and
The Pride and the Passion
(57, Kramer). Best of all, Sinatra played a drug addict with startling pain in
The Man with the Golden Arm
(56, Otto Preminger), and was most at ease in
The Joker Is Wild
(57, Charles Vidor), a vague biopic of comedian Joe E. Lewis (about an entertainer who falls foul of the mob), and
Some Came Running
(58, Vincente Minnelli), one of the few movies in which he permitted himself to appear vulnerable—and unusually moving for that.

At this stage, his interest in movies was consumed in the thought that the Pack should appear together in films. If those movies adequately reflect the society of that group, no wonder Sinatra looked more disgruntled with the years. After a bad comedy
—A Hole in the Head
(59, Frank Capra)—and a terrible musical
—Can-Can
(60, Walter Lang)—he appeared with entourage in
Ocean’s 11
(60, Lewis Milestone);
Sergeants Three
(62, John Sturges);
Four for Texas
(63, Robert Aldrich); and
Robin and the Seven Hoods
(64, Gordon Douglas). Worse than these, his judgment seemed to have deserted him, for he took on one lame project after another:
The Devil at Four O’Clock
(61, Mervyn Le Roy);
Come Blow Your Horn
(63, Bud Yorkin);
None But the Brave
(65, directed by Sinatra);
Marriage on the Rocks
(65, Jack Donohue);
Von Ryan’s Express
(65, Mark Robson);
Assault on a Queen
(66, Donohue); and
The Naked Runner
(67, Sidney J. Furie).

Only
The Manchurian Candidate
(62, John Frankenheimer) used his real abilities until 1967 when he played
Tony Rome
(67, Douglas). That film was deeply nostalgic of Chandler and Bogart, but it did contain the marvelous image of a soured Sinatra watching chloroform poured on a rag for himself and saying “when.” He stayed with Douglas for the deeper disenchantment of
The Detective
(68) and for a Tony Rome sequel,
Lady in Cement
(68). Only one other film—
Dirty Dingus Magee
(70, Burt Kennedy)—appeared before his retirement in 1971. He had given up movies long before.

He returned once more to movies, or to television, as a cop against the Mob in
Contract on Cherry Street
(77, William A. Graham); and then he played a cop whose wife is dying in the dark-etched
The First Deadly Sin
(80, Brian G. Hutton). He took a cameo role in
Cannonball Run II
(84, Hal Needham).

What all of this misses, I think, is Sinatra’s pervasive influence on American acting: he glamorized the fatalistic outsider; he made his own anger intriguing; and in the late fifties, especially, he was one of our darkest male icons. It helps illustrate the interaction of singing and acting. Sinatra is a noir sound, like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire, and the quiet weeping of women in the background.

Bryan Singer
, b. New York, 1965
1993:
Public Access
. 1995:
The Usual Suspects
. 1998:
Apt Pupil
. 2000:
X-Men
. 2003:
X2
. 2006:
Superman Returns
. 2008:
Valkyrie
.

The Usual Suspects
won an Oscar for its screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, and he may yet prove the most interesting person behind
Suspects
. As it is, McQuarrie’s first directing job,
The Way of the Gun
, is rather better than
Apt Pupil
or
X-Men
.

Singer is a graduate of the USC film school, where he made the unreleased
Lion’s Den
. He then wrote
Public Access
, about a man who develops a cable TV talk show for sinister reasons.
The Usual Suspects
was an enormous advance on that, a film buff’s homage, but a very witty exploration of the noir mood, beautifully acted. It’s sad to think that that sensibility is already caught up in
X-Men
, and enough to suggest that the interest in noir legend was more technical than human.
Apt Pupil
(from a Stephen King story) is another portrait of a smart kid getting lost in the real world—and maybe a warning sign. So we come back to the first question: where did the intelligence in
The Usual Suspects
come from? Nothing has tried to answer that question.
Valkyrie
was a picture in which the wow factor in young filmmakers seemed to have eclipsed any memory of the subject.

Robert Siodmak
(1900–73), b. Memphis, Tennessee
1929:
Menschen am Sonntag
(codirected with Edgar G. Ulmer). 1930:
Abschied
. 1931:
Der Mann, der Seinen Morder Sucht; Voruntersuchung
. 1932:
Sturme der Leidenschaft; Le Sexe Faible; Quick
. 1933:
Brennendes Geheimnis
. 1934:
La Crise est Finie
. 1935:
La Vie Parisienne; Mister Flow
. 1937:
Cargaisons Blanches
. 1938:
Mollenard; Ultimatum
(codirected with Robert Wiene). 1939:
Pièges
. 1941:
West Point Widow
. 1942:
Fly-by-Night; My Heart Belongs to Daddy; The Night Before the Divorce
. 1943:
Someone to Remember; Son of Dracula
. 1944:
Phantom Lady; Cobra Woman; Christmas Holiday
. 1945:
The Suspect; The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry/Uncle Harry; The Spiral Staircase
. 1946:
The Killers; The Dark Mirror
. 1947:
Time Out of Mind
. 1948:
Cry of the City; Criss Cross
. 1949:
The Great Sinner; The File on Thelma Jordon
. 1950:
Deported
. 1951:
The Whistle at Eaton Falls
. 1952:
The Crimson Pirate
. 1953:
Le Grand Jeu
. 1955:
Die Ratten
. 1956:
Mein Vater, der Schauspieler
. 1957:
Nachts, Wenn der Teufel Kam
. 1959:
Dorothea Angermann; The Rough and the Smooth; Bitter Sweet
. 1960:
Der Schulfreund
. 1961:
L’Affaire Nina B
. 1962:
Escape from East Berlin
. 1964:
Der Schut;
Der Schatz der Azteken
. 1965:
Die Pyramide der Sonnengottes
. 1968:
Custer of the West
(codirected with Irving Lerner). 1969:
Der Kampf um Rom
.

When he was only a year old, Siodmak’s parents moved to Leipzig. As a young man he worked as a stage director, and in the 1920s he made and lost a fortune in banking. By 1925, he was assisting Kurt Bernhardt as an editor and scenarist, and in 1929, with Edgar Ulmer, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Eugene Schuftan, he made
Menschen am Sonntag
, a casual, free portrait of young people more French in feeling than German and, arguably, more in key with Ulmer’s later work than Siodmak’s. Nevertheless,
Abschied
and
Voruntersuchung
showed a special skill with sound and a sensitivity that made him unusual in German cinema. With Nazism, he left Germany for Paris and did not really settle until he reached Hollywood in 1940.

Like many Germans, Siodmak thrived in America, quickly learning to blend the melodrama of German cinema, its visual expressionism, and the technical facilities of the big studios. He was never more than an assignment director, but he never lost a mordant sense of humor, narrative economy, a relish for actors and actresses, a special care for interiors, and a readiness to extract the best from the system. His American films are made with a proper awareness of the limits and potential of each project. Thus
The Great Sinner
is meant as silly vibrato where many lesser men might have labored hopelessly after the real Dostoyevsky;
Son of Dracula
is all in the spirit of lugubriousness with which a coffin arrives at a lonely railway station bearing the inscription ALUCARD;
Phantom Lady
is an excellent thriller, using Franchot Tone and Ella Raines very well;
Cobra Woman
is Maria Montez (as twins) in full idiotic splendor—at one point the good lady describes some subplot as “a wild dream of her decaying brain”;
The Spiral Staircase
is truly frightening, and extracts every ounce of tension from Dorothy McGuire as a deaf-mute;
Uncle Harry
is one of the few films to abandon George Sanders the cad and discover a meek, put-upon man bullied by sisters;
The Suspect
is enlivened by Charles Laughton’s presence and by the unusual rapport that Siodmak obtained with him.
The Killers
is a thriller that exploits the postwar fashion for realism more creatively than was usual and has a clumsy spontaneity in the actual robbery;
The File on Thelma Jordon
knows what a mistress of the medium Barbara Stanwyck is; and
The Crimson Pirate
is boys’ knockabout as bright and snappy as Christmas crackers. Time and again, humdrum material proves more entertaining than one would have suspected.