The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

Frankie Machine gets clean, gets dirty, gets clean again.

You’re watching a movie and someone’s about to do drugs and you’re wondering what the needle drop is gonna be. Will it be “White Rabbit”? “Purple Haze”? “Comfortably Numb”? But then you discover the movie is from 1955 and psychedelia hasn’t been invented yet and you’re about to watch Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) shoot up to a big band score from Elmer Bernstein. Weird, man.

In The Man with the Golden Arm, junkie Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) comes home clean from prison and is looking for a fresh start as a drummer. Instead, stress over money and shame about wanting to leave his wife for strip club hostess Molly (Kim Novak) lead him back to his drug habit. Sure, there are subplots—Frankie’s wife (Eleanor Parker) has been Munchausening him¹, Frankie cheats while dealing an important poker game, Frankie’s wife accidentally murders Frankie’s evil drug dealer—but the crux of the movie is Frankie’s relapse and the climax is Molly helping him go cold turkey.

I loved Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, but Frankie Machine is a tougher role and Sinatra’s not really up to it. It’s not like he didn’t try: he went, like, half-Method, learning the drums (emulating Montgomery Clift learning the bugle in FH2E) and spending time at rehab clinics. It’s just not a strong enough performance to bolster a movie that’s got such big DARE vibes.

Rating: 6/10, more Reefer Madness than Requiem for a Dream.²

Cast and Crew

Kim Novak, who once sold refrigerators as “Miss Deepfreeze,” is the best thing about this movie. She plays a part that requires some hardcore smoldering action. 

That is some elite smoldering right there.

1955 was a big year for Novak, as she sizzled in this and also starred in Picnic, a film based on a William Inge³ play that co-starred William Holden. She reunited with Sinatra later in Pal Joey (1957) and then had a twofer with Jimmy Stewart in Bell, Book and Candle and Vertigo (both 1958). That’s the bulk of her career, though she acted sporadically throughout the ‘60s, including in works based on “Moll Flanders” and “Of Human Bondage.” But Kim Novak went out on her own terms, refusing to be swallowed up by Hollywood and enjoying a rich life afterward. Now she paints. I think Kim Novak’s pretty cool. 

Eleanor Parker played Frankie’s gaslighting wife, Zosh. Parker was nominated for Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for her performances in Caged and Detective Story, but man, she’s not great in this. Parker gets redeemed, though: she later plays the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965), who, according to this baffling video, is actually the hero of that movie. 

Nelson Algren was the author of the novel “The Man with the Golden Arm” and winner of the first National Book Award for fiction. With that and “A Walk on the Wild Side,” plus his highly-publicized relationship with Simone de Beauvoir⁴, he was one of the best-known authors in America. That’s, uh, not so true anymore.

We saw Otto Preminger as an actor playing a German prison guard in Stalag 17. Otto Preminger the director is a much bigger deal. He’ll show up again at the end of the decade and we’ll tackle his boundary-pushing oeuvre then.

The Trivia

We won’t see Sinatra—“Ol’ Blue Eyes,” “the Chairman of the board”—again in this column, so let’s do a deep dive. For his film career, you’ll want to know his three movies with Gene Kelly: Anchors Aweigh (1945) and On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ball Game (both 1949). On the Town has music from Leonard Bernstein, including the song “New York, New York” (which was parodied in the Simpsons song “Springfield, Springfield”). Sinatra was also in the film biography of Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), where he sang a mediocre version of “Ol’ Man River.”⁵

Then there’s the ‘50s, where Sinatra picked up major dramatic roles. He won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity and was up for the lead role in On the Waterfront (though boy are we lucky it went to Brando instead). In 1955, along with starring in The Man with the Golden Arm, he did Guys and Dolls with that same Marlon Brando. Guys and Dolls is a Frank Loesser musical based on the Damon Runyon short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” and you may now be thinking, “wait, Marlon Brando was in a musical? Can Marlon Brando sing?” You’re right to ask, and no, no he cannot.

Sinatra’s late career had Rat Pack movies like the original Ocean’s 11 (1960) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), as well as the not-Rat Pack movie The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He also had some high-profile romances, including marraiges to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow.⁶

Sinatra’s music is also, unsurprisingly, noteworthy. He was the face of pop music in the 1940s and was the idol of “bobby soxers,” teenage girls named for their bobby socks. Sinatra broke out with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra (with Tommy Dorsey on trombone and Buddy Rich on drums). He went solo to compete with Bing Crosby and set off “Sinatramania.”⁷

Ah, now I get Sinatramania.

He has a bunch of songs you should know and I’ve thrown them into a Spotify playlist that you can listen to here.⁸ If you just want one song to remember, though, it’d be “My Way,” Sinatra’s signature track that his buddy Paul Anka adapted from a French bop.⁹

Why was Sinatra called “Chairman of the board”? Because he founded Reprise Records in 1960, a label that is still around. Some of the current signees are luminaries Michael Bublé (makes sense), Enya (boring), My Chemical Romance (huh?), and Mastodon (??!). Yeah, heavy metal band Mastodon is on the label Sinatra founded. Weird, man.

Odds and Ends

The band Frankie Goes to Hollywood got their name from a movie magazine article on Sinatra’s trip to California…Scooby-Doo got his name from Sinatra’s scatting on “Strangers In The Night”...I bet Elmer Bernstein hated explaining that he wasn’t Leonard Bernstein…Robert Strauss, the same actor who played Animal in Stalag 17, played Schwiefka, the guy who runs the poker game Frankie deals for…Alexander McQueen named a stupid looking bag “The Novak,” after Kim…Gay Talese wrote a profile of Sinatra called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” that’s considered a seminal work of New Journalism…Sinatra’s lone directoral effort, None but the Brave (1965), gets its title from John Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” (“None but the brave deserve the fair”).

Also, one last fun fact about Kim Novak: she dated both Sammy Davis Jr. and the son of Dominican dictator-slash-mass murderer Rafael Trujillo; somehow, it was the relationship with Sammy that was problematic.

1. From the NHS: “Munchausen syndrome is a psychological condition where someone pretends to be ill or deliberately produces symptoms of illness in themselves. Their main intention is to assume the ‘sick role’ so that people care for them and they are the centre of attention.”

2. Yes, this isn’t CinemaSins, but we have to do it: the poker in this movie is terrible. One example: Dominowski folds a full house in stud poker to Frankie for $500 when there’s AT LEAST $3,600 already in the pot because maybe Frankie has a straight flush. But Dominowski’s call would close the action! If there was any chance at all that Frankie was bluffing (and the men at the table say that Frankie’s been bluffing them all night), that’s a snap call since you’re getting at 7 to 1 on your money. On the Mount Rushmore of nonsensical poker in movies, Man With the Golden Arm is George Washington. 

3. Is William Inge Clifford Odets? Maybe. Well, one of those guys was from Independence, Kansas, was known as the “playwright of the Midwest,” and did “Picnic,” “Bus Stop,” “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” and “Come Back, Little Sheba” (all four of which were turned to films).

4. Simone de Beauvoir fictionalized her affair with Algren in her work “Les Mandarins.” You should know her for her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and her feminist work “The Second Sex.” 

5. Just leave that song to Paul Robeson.

6. Mia Farrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning son Ronan Farrow, whom she had while married to Woody Allen, might be Sinatra’s kid. I just don’t care—I’d like to spend as little time thinking about the relationship dynamics in the Allen-Farrow-Previn family tree, thanks.

7. Though seriously, listen to some of these hits and think how to explain to someone under the age of 40 how these sleepy dirges set off any kind of “mania.”

8. Here’s the list for the Spotify-averse: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “High Hopes,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “It Was A Very Good Year,” “Strangers In The Night,” “Somethin’ Stupid,” “That’s Life,” “My Way,” and “New York, New York” (which is different than the On the Town “New York, New York”). Sometimes you’ll need to know that Nelson Riddle arranged some of Sinatra’s songs, including “Love and Marriage” and “Young At Heart.”

9. In a quest to explain every reference in “The Simpsons,” I’ll tell you that “I Drank A Very Good Beer” is a direct parody of Sinatra’s “It Was A Very Good Year.”