Lady in Cement (1968)

Strong and Moving!

Captivating movie !

Absolutely Fantastic

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

In this perfect representative of the 1960s, Tony Rome is back! Frank Sinatra reprises his role as the private detective who lives on a houseboat in Miami, with an endless supply of booze, broads, and one-liners. In the sequel, he discovers a naked woman while scuba diving—which would normally be great except for one tiny detail: her feet are encased in cement.As Frankie and Richard Conte try to solve the murder, they get entangled in the sordid world of gangsters, strippers, and the alcoholic Raquel Welch who can't seem to remember anything about the night of the murder. As you'd expect, since this is a cheesy detective movie from 1968, there's lots of bikini-clad broads, naked broads, one-liners that will either make you chuckle or groan, fight scenes full of humor, and a musical score that couldn't have been more 60s if it tried. If that's not what you're looking for, you'll probably sigh and complain for 90 minutes, but if you liked Tony Rome, you'll love seeing Frankie do it all over again in Lady in Cement.

The second and last Tony Rome film "Lady In Cement" was released in 1968. Its bright colours, perky background music and slang terms (like "fuzz" and "split" etc.) are typical of the period but there are also some features which aren't. The practice of murder victims being anchored underwater in cement shoes was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s and the movie also draws influences from the films noir of the 1940s and 1950s. For example, the sequence in which the "lady in cement" is found by Rome, strongly evokes an underwater sequence in "The Night Of The Hunter" (1955) and a character called Gronsky is identical to Moose Malloy from Raymond Chandler's "Murder My Sweet" (1944). A scene in which Frank Sinatra gazes at a large portrait of Raquel Welch's character is also a conscious replication of a motif which was frequently seen in the noirs of the 40s and 50s.In this movie, Tony Rome is a typical noir private detective working on a missing person case that involves murder and gangsters but also shows certain characteristics of James Bond (e.g. fighting off a shark, being surrounded by semi-clad young ladies etc.). The incongruities highlighted above could be regarded as disconcerting but in this movie seem to have been used purely for laughs.Private eye Tony Rome (Frank Sinatra) is scuba-diving somewhere off the Miami coast at a location where some Spanish treasure had reputedly been lost many years earlier when he sees the nude corpse of a blonde woman whose feet had been set in cement. Shortly after reporting the incident to the coastguard, he gets approached by a hulk of a man called Waldo Gronsky (Dan Blocker) who hires him to find his lost girlfriend, Sandra Lomax. Rome's investigations take him to the go-go bar where Sandra used to work as a dancer and he speaks to her roommate and gets a hostile reception from the camp owner Danny Yale (Frank Raiter) and his bartender boyfriend.Having learned from her roommate that Sandra had been at a party at the home of Kit Forrest (Raquel Welch) on the night when she died, Rome goes to visit the alcoholic heiress who tells him that she can't remember much about the night in question. Shortly after, Rome has to make a quick exit after being threatened by her protective neighbour and ex-mobster, Al Mungar (Martin Gabel). After Sandra's roommate is found dead and a couple of thugs try to kill Gronsky, Rome gets into a whole series of tight spots (including being framed for the murder of Danny Yale) before he eventually brings his investigation to a successful conclusion.Despite the nature of its plot, "Lady In Cement" is essentially a light-hearted confection which enables Sinatra to indulge in numerous in-jokes and have fun with women who are half his age. He does well in conveying how jaded Rome has become and is also good at delivering some snappy one-liners. Among the supporting cast, Dan Blocker makes the strongest impression as the larger-than-life Gronsky. The emphasis in this movie is very much on the humour and judged on this basis, it clearly succeeded.

While playing tag with a pair of sharks Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome discovers the body of a woman with cement overshoes at the bottom of the ocean. As he says it was obvious someone did not want this body to be discovered. Which begins the tale of Sinatra's second Tony Rome film Lady In Cement.Sinatra as Rome is still living the good life on his boat and betting whatever he does earn on horses. He still has a good in with the Miami Police in the person of Richard Conte as Lieutenant Santini, but the in only goes so far as we see when Sinatra is framed for a murder and Conte has to go after his good friend. Of course in a rather long chase sequence toward the end of the film Frank does get the better of Conte and half the Miami PD. In order to appreciate Lady In Cement and Tony Rome you have to really dig Sinatra's whole hipster, Rat Pack shtick from the times. If you don't both films will leave you cold. But Lady In Cement was far worse in that Frank attacked the nascent gay liberation movement with a few well chosen imitation lisps mocking the gay characters in the film. After the Stonewall Rebellion a lot of establishment figures even in the entertainment world mocked the movement and Frank Sinatra was no exception. Interesting because in The Detective Sinatra played a detective who got a coerced confession of a gay suspect in the murder of a gay man and then when evidence showed New York had executed the wrong man took it upon himself to get justice applied rightly.A few in jokes for wannabe swingers abound in Lady In Cement, the strip club where the deceased woman worked was called Jilly's after Sinatra favorite eatery in New York. And at one point Frank remarks to leading lady Raquel Welch that he 'once knew a broad who collected bull fighters' a reference to former Mrs. Sinatra, Ava Gardner. I've got to wonder what Ava must have thought of that. Even more important how did Richard Deacon who was a closeted gay man and had a small part in the film must have felt about some of Sinatra's lines in the script?Still the smarmy lisps of mockery really have made Lady In Cement not wear well over the years. Definitely for die-hard Sinatra fans.

With a few exceptions such as French Connection II sequels don't have a high strike-rate in terms of success and this is no exception. Whilst it is indisputable that Sinatra COULD act when he put his mind to it - From Here To Eternity, The Manchurian Candidate - the fact remains that he put his mind to it all too infrequently and often - The Naked Runner, The Detective - the best he would do would be to check his ring-a-ding-ding persona with the Assistant Director before walking on set.Part of the problem was that his millions of fans, including myself, would (and probably still will) watch him in anything which albeit, as in my case, not uncritically, left him free to be self-indulgent and walk through too many movies. I for one and speaking as a lifelong fan never really found him believable as a private eye in either Tony Rome or this sequel; it's just Sinatra perpetuating the image he had created since his 'comeback' as the super-cool, super-hip Jack-the-lad, ogling the girls, tossing off the one-liners and having as much of a ball as possible whilst shooting a movie more or less on time and under budget. Any movie that begins with a blatant rip-off of Farewell, My Lovely with ax extra large man (Mike Mazurski, Dan Blocker) hiring a private detective (Dick Powell, Frank Sinatra) to find the girl friend who disappeared whilst he was in the slammer is clearly struggling and the fact that it then abandons the plot developments of the Chandler story in favour of something more inept doesn't help in the least. Okay, if it's a choice between this and Mr. Bean then fine but other than that it's really just for Sinatra completists.