ARCHIVE
The Best Films You've Never Seen:
RICHARD LINKLATER on Some Came Running: An online exclusive
An online exclusive
Friday, May 29, 2009
By Robert K. Elder
Director Richard Linklater (School of Rock, Dazed and Confused, Slacker and A Scanner Darkly) talks about 1958's Some Came Running, the first Rat Pack film, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine.
Linklater starts our new series in which movie directors champion a film that's been critically savaged, overlooked or simply forgotten.
The full conversation will appear in the forthcoming book The Best Films You've Never Seen
Rob Elder: How would you describe this film to someone who’s never seen it?
Richard Linklater: It’s a story about Dave Hirsch (Frank Sinatra). He’s the prodigal son returning to his hometown, post World War II. The movie came out in ’58 but it really depicts a period 10 years earlier. So the movie itself really is a period piece. Even though, 50 years later, it seems to have lost that quality, it’s important to keep in mind that it is depicting an era 10 years before.
Sinatra plays a drifting soldier, a writer who is sort of blocked, who hasn’t written in a while. He’s cynical and drinking more, but he returns to his home in Parkman, Indiana, where all his colliding, contradictory impulses are played out — his mixed feelings about his hometown and these two worlds that he seems to inhabit simultaneously, both the world of respect, culture and smart English teacher (Martha Hyer) and then another world of booze, broads and gambling.
These worlds are embodied by different people most pointedly his gambling and drinking buddy Bama Dillert (Dean Martin) and Ginny (Shirley MacLaine), the floozy who he’s kind of taken up with. His other world is the hypocritical, social scene of Parkman with his phony older brother — played by Arthur Kennedy in just one of the great depictions of a phony — and his frigid wife, and all these society ladies, kind of frigid and false. The movie just rips the cover off the mannered, Fifties era of America — just that whole mindset of conformity. It’s just a great, scary depiction and it’s just a wonderful melodrama.
RE: Do you remember where you saw the film?
RL: I saw it on campus in ’84, at the University of Texas. I’d moved off and was starting to make films for the first time. And I just went. This film affected me. I remember the next few days thinking about it constantly; it was so much more than I expected. It was a big eye-opener for me. I don’t think I’d really discovered Douglas Sirk yet either but to see a Fifties melodrama that was actually so subversive.
I think it had something to do about Dave Hirsch’s character and something personal with me. I think we’re all torn, in a way, between both worlds. I felt that way personally. I’m from a small town in east Texas. As an aspiring artist at that time, I was moved by his story. He’s a writer and nothing’s come of it yet, so he can give in to his lower impulses with the gambling and the broads. He can hang out with that world but he really craves some sort of respectability. Ultimately, Dave inhabits both these worlds but he’s not really at home in either of them.
RE: He was a failed novelist. He had one novel that no one had read…
RL: Yeah, the artist out of work is a dangerous thing, you know. He’s attracted to these two different women.
RE: Speaking of which, a 24-year-old Shirley MacLaine plays Ginny, the “loose” girl who follows Dave around. She won an Oscar for the role.
RL: Deservedly so. She’d only been in a few films then: The Trouble with Harry and probably most importantly Artists and Models, the Frank Tashlin movie. She’d also been in Around the World in 80 Days, as the Hindu princess.
I always think of her as the title character in Sweet Charity, Bob Fosse’s first film. I think of Charity as Ginny come back to life and moved to the big city. I just feel a connection there between those two characters for her. She’s so great in this movie.
And Sinatra, the story was that he had a print of Some Came Running and it was a film that he would watch over and over. He would invite people over to see it in the screening room, usually under the premise of “Come see how great Shirley is.” And she certainly is. I’ve shown this movie to a lot of people and they just go, “Oh my God.” She was the babe of her day; that is such a great performance.
I think all three of them are fantastic. It’s my favorite film of all three of those people: Martin, Sinatra and MacLaine.
RE: Depending on whose biography you read, Minnelli brought them together — according to his version — but I think it’s more likely that Sinatra got his friends a job, making this the first Rat Pack movie.
RL: This was the first Rat Pack movie and, to me, it’s still the best Rat Pack movie. It’s the ultimate Rat Pack movie although it lacks Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. Those guys were always kind of minor players anyway.
To me, it was always about Frank and Dean and Shirley MacLaine as the mascot. But this is unique because these guys are—in a big way—sort of playing themselves. In Sergeants 3 and Oceans 11 and those films, they’re burglars. They’re nowhere near themselves. They’re always kind of cool and you can tell they’re having a good time, but there is an element that’s so who they are.
RE: This was filmed just after Elvis hit it big in 1956, so Sinatra had been outshined or replaced by the advent of rock 'n’ roll…
RL: There are definite parallels between Dave Hirsch and Sinatra. Pre-From Here to Eternity, Sinatra was sort of washed up, not in favor, probably close to being an alcoholic bum, kind of a has-been and that’s where Dave finds himself right at that moment.
RE: It’s been written over and over, and perhaps cruelly, that Shirley MacLaine was the mascot of the Rat Pack. But in this film, that’s exactly her role. I’m wondering if that was informed by their actual relationships, if you get a sense of that onscreen?
RL: They couldn’t have nailed it so well if it didn’t, if there wasn’t something personal there. I think they were all buddies.
RE: This is the first time I’ve seen this movie, on your recommendation, and the thing for me that was off-putting was Dean Martin constantly calling Shirley MacLaine and the other girl “pigs”!
RL: Even she knows she’s a pig.
RE: How do you read that? And is there something else modern audiences need to know going into Some Came Running?
RL: Yeah, there are charges of misogyny from critics. But, I mean, how can you look at this and not think it’s Dave and Bama who are the pigs, clearly? But it is a sad portrayal of a woman’s masochism certainly.
But Bama, Dean Martin, is ultimately kind of a piece of shit. But he’s a charming one, he has his charms. But see, Bama never would have responded to Ginny, her pure love, the way Dave does. Dave is an artist. Bama would be incapable of what Dave is capable of.
RE: When you first saw the film, what was it about for you?
RL: What was it about? I think it’s a great depiction of a guy dealing with conflicting impulses, a typical Minnelli character, an artist who’s divided against himself.
You saw the same guy over and over, in The Band Wagon, American in Paris and Lust for Life. Those are typical, I guess. I just think it’s a very deadly depiction of how you can seemingly inhabit two worlds. How you could have a love for both these women that couldn’t be more different.
When these women do meet, Ginny and Dave’s school teacher love interest, there’s that one just unnerving scene where she visits her at the school and they talk. In a movie with opposites colliding, they are so opposite that they shouldn’t even be in the same scene. It’s just unnerving. Like they shouldn’t be in the same frame together.
RE: You’re completely right about this. It’s just like nails on chalkboard and you think “Oh God, please just end quickly.”
RL: It’s opposites colliding everywhere, stylistically and thematically.
RE: According to James Jones, this is what his novel Some Came Running is about: “It’s the separation between human beings, the fact that no two people totally get together, that everybody wants to be loved more than they want to love.” There was some tension during the making of the movie, and Minnelli’s response was “Why you would take 1,266 pages to say that is debatable.” But do you see that theme come to life in the film?
RL: I think the adaptation of Some Came Running is one of the greatest adaptations ever. I’ll admit, I haven’t made it all the way through the book Some Came Running. I read about three quarters of it, got interrupted and never picked it back up. But it’s dense, it’s lengthy and actually, to Minnelli’s credit, the movie’s depiction of Ginny is much more sympathetic than in the book. I just think Minnelli loved women and had a feel for her. She’s a great depiction of someone giving unconditionally. And when Dave responds to that, when he asks her to marry him, to me, that’s such a moving moment.
RE: Is there a particular scene that sort of closed the deal for you, that made you a fan?
RL: I love all of it; so much of it’s so funny. I love it when he first meets Bama, you see him sitting in the background. It’s a tremendous use of Cinemascope, one of the best ever, in the way he frames the shot. You see his hat, before you see him, on the right side of the frame. [Laughs] Bama and his damned hat. And the way those two come together is sort of a seduction between them. That’s very interesting.
RE: I want to get into Minnelli a little bit. This was quite a departure for him because he was known for melodramas and musicals at this point. But what about this film lets you know it was a Minnelli film?
RL: Oh my God, are you kidding? It’s almost impossible to describe but you just have to feel it. I always call it a musical without the numbers — the way it was shot, the colors and yet it was filmed on location so it has this realistic quality.
Billy Wilder was quoted as saying “Minnelli’s a decorator.” And he certainly was, but I think at the service of something. Visually, he was one of the most interesting directors ever.
That last sequence where the guy is chasing Sinatra with a gun. The music swells and there’s this blast of red. You’re getting lighting and things that you would see in a musical on a sound stage and boom, it’s real. A real location. I just love the way he can amp it up.
RE: What things in the film, though, are characteristically Minnelli?
RL: Well, just the story in general. Whether he’s Gene Kelly in An American in Paris or Astaire in The Band Wagon, Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful.
RE: People who are divided against themselves. Those are the characters he’s attracted to.
RL: Yeah, an artist who’s trying to come to grips. He’s trying to reach out to other people. You see these people yearning for some kind of human connection but there’s something within themselves that makes it difficult. It is a depiction of how people come together or don’t come together, where you negotiate and what’s the difference. How your needs really can’t be fulfilled by one person. That you’re sort of ships passing in the night that you will have some kind of bond. It’s based on certain conditional things.
RE: Now there are two great Hollywood stories that come out of the production of this. The first one is in reference to Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. They were on set, in his trailer and the assistant director comes over and says, “Mr. Sinatra won’t you please come out. We’re two weeks behind schedule. Please come out.” And Sinatra says, “Come in. Is that a script in your hand?”
“Yes, that’s a script in my hand.”
“Let me have it.”
So he takes it and flips through it, rips out 20 pages and says, “Okay, we’re not behind now.”
RL: That’s a take-off on John Ford doing the same thing when some studio person visited him on the set. I’ve almost tried that myself.
Read the entire interview in the forthcoming book The Best Films You've Never Seen (Spring 2010, from Chicago Review Press)
www.robelder.com