The 1958 Vincent Minnelli film Some Came Running is an oddity of varied genres: a proto Rat Pack film, a soldier’s-homecoming movie, and as weird a tale of writer’s block as Barton Fink. It is also a product of its time, when America watched its hometown fantasy go dark and men like my father wrestled with false dichotomies: drinking or writing? madonna or whore? I wonder how many times David Lynch has seen it. 

Frank Sinatra plays a writer (so we know we’re in Bizarro World) who seems to have spent the years since the war drinking and not writing (though he carries a copy of an “Unfinished Story” in his suitcase, along with Modern Library volumes of Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and fifths of scotch). He returns to his hometown (Parkman, Indiana) via Greyhound bus in the company of a floozy from Chicago, played by Rat Pack moll and future reincarnation expert Shirley MacLaine. He gives her fifty bucks to go back to from whence she came but she is like gum on his shoe. 

Instead he falls for a creative writing teacher who wears pearls and cashmere sweaters and seems, in general , to have a stick up her ass. Until that Hollywood moment when she removes the pins from her hair and she falls, swooning, into Sinatra’s skinny arms. Mostly she is puzzled by his failure to live up to his potential as a writer, and the company he keeps: his best friend is a professional gambler named Bama (Dino, affecting a kind of Foghorn Leghorn accent) and he runs with MacLaine and some other dames who behave (and seem to like to be treated) like hair-band groupies from the Sunset Strip. The amount of drinking (and suggested sex) that goes on in this story is phenomenal; the quaint little town comes off like Pottersville, aka Bedford Falls if George Bailey had never lived. Every altercation ends with someone breaking a bottle, pulling a knife, going for a gun. Even the nice lady who gave Sinatra licorice when he was a kid is introduced coming out of a bar in the middle of the day. 

Some Came Running was based on a James Jones novel; the film adaptation of his From Here to Eternity helped resurrect Sinatra’s then ailing career and maybe he thought the lightning would strike twice. Jones was one of those novelists of my father’s generation (Styron, Mailer et al) who came back from the war determined to carve America a new asshole with giant, door-stopper novels about men and war. His disenchantment with what he found stateside seems as cold as Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, at least in this film adaptation. No amount of “Metrocolor” can bring the heat and soften the shadows. The most sympathetic character in the story dies; the rest are condemned to keep on living, and drinking until their livers give out. See you at the fair.