Some Came Running (1958)

Simply A Masterpiece

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This movie is a sure cure for Insomnia, except for the most extreme cases.Sinatra and Dino play two guys that don't make a bit of sense, but we're supposed to think they do.In other words, they play the characters they always play in movies together.What they are talking about is not just outdated. It never existed. I was born in 1956, and nothing they do or say makes any sense to me.The movie makes no sense either. It is just a bunch of words strung together, apparently written by people on drugs.It's some sort of melodrama, but don't try to stay awake through it. It'll just make you hate the idiots in the movie even more.Some came running to watch the movie. All left sleeping.

I saw this film when released in 1957 and really did not like it. I knew people were impressed with Shirley McLaine's acting but to a young guy like me it missed the emotion of a "rat pack" film, which I thought it was. I never gave too much thought to this film, but recently I read that the "Cahiers du Cinema" had placed it among the 100 all time best films ever made. Noticing it was going to be shown on TV I saw it and was amazed. All the actors are excellent and so is Minneli's direction, apart from the last scenes of the killer going wild, this film did not age. The beauty of the film is in the characters. First there is Arthur Kennedy and his wife trying to climb up the social ladder in what we could describe as an "obsessive " way, but that was so typical of a small town in America in the fifties. Then there are Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the outcasts, but which still fit the category of the bohemians kind of barely accepted . But then comes Shirley McLaine which does not fit anywhere, at first sight you would classify her as a tramp, but she is not one at all, she is just a wonderful person, too naive in her ways, but trying to survive a hard life. She breaks all the rules, she is the opposite of Martha Hyer a compulsive conventional person. When Frank Sinatra, after being rejected by Hyer, decides to marry Shirley, he is accepting the unconventional, specially when he knows he can help. This film is predicting the social changes that would come in the seventies and that would change America. Shirley McLaine as Ginnie Moorehead was standing for all that.

This movie was made in Madison, Indiana when I was a teenager.I lived about 20 miles north of Madison.The production company was looking for a crowd for the street carnival scene in the movie. Some of my family thought it might be interesting to go down and mingle in the crowd and we might end up in the movie. However, something came up and we couldn't go.I saw the movie shortly after it was released and have seen it a couple of times since and was not overly impressed with the storyline or the dialog(very derivative). I was not impressed with Frank Sinatra, at all. However, Shirley Maclaine and Dean Martin were very good in the supporting roles.The cinematography, however, is excellent.Madison is located in a very green, rolling, area of Indiana on the Ohio River and is very lush, and the background of the Ohio River shot over the characters shoulders in the cemetery, in Kentucky, captures the beauty of the area. The photography at the Lanier Mansion (1844) definitely captured the affluence of the character that lives there in the movie.

The screen adaptation of James Jones' novel is little more than a transparent, third-person daydream, presenting every writer's inflated image of himself as the tough, honest, alienated, misunderstood, sensitive, handsome stranger who changes the lives of a stereotypical small town community, from the attractive (but sexually repressed) schoolmarm to the dimwitted (but kindhearted) floozy. Most of the actors are likewise typecast: rat-packers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra (who owed Jones a debt of gratitude for his comeback role in 'From Here to Eternity') do a lot of drinking and card playing; Shirley MacLaine is her usual nutty self; and poor Arthur Kennedy sleepwalks resignedly through his thankless role as the rebel writer's conservative older brother. The film can still be entertaining if seen as a dated post-war soap opera, and here I freely admit my opinions might have been compromised by seeing the film on VHS: the colorful wide-screen production is totally lost in the pan-and-scan video format, leaving the impression that some vital action always occurring just out of frame.