Granville
One of the Regulars
- Messages
- 214
- Location
- Long Beach, NY
Check out Tony Rome. I put Tony Rome, The Detective, and the Rome sequel Lady in Cement in the same bag of latter day Blue Eyes playing the same character, but only the original Rome really works. In all three movies Sinatra is pudgy, past his snake-hips youth, but in Rome he knows it and plays on the fact that he's no longer the coolest guy on the planet. By the sequel, and in the Detective, he's gone back to his original persona, getting the girl (literally sweeping her off her feet in the Detective), and self-assured. Even though the back story in Detective is that his wife is a nympho that he can't control, he still beds her when he wants to (in what today would be a very controversial scene), and even while playing it a tad world-weary (when it is plain that the murder victim is gay and another cop passes a remark, Frank says something to the effect of, "I got my own problems," dismissing any judgement), there is still a dignity to his character, a panache. But in Tony Rome, he's a guy beaten, tossed out of the NYPD, and completely un-hip by the new standards of the sixties. And he knows it. He even complains about not getting laid! Two beautiful women get close to him, but he gets nowhere with either of them. While the cool cats are wearing beads and long hair, he's parading around in a captain's hat like Thurston Howell on Gilligan's Island. For my money it's one of his best performances, pissing on his own image. And a good movie.I just watched her in an old Sinatra movie called The Detective.