"The Man with the Golden Arm" was a ground-breaking film but it wasn't a very good one; in fact, it's a pretty poor picture. At a time when everyone else wouldn't touch the subject, Otto Preminger made an explicit movie about drug addiction and all its attendant horrors and he's certainly to be commended for it but he also made a movie that was highly melodramatic, even for him, and studio-bound in the worst possible way.Frank Sinatra is Frankie Machine, the former addict coaxed back by a Machiavellian drug dealer played by Darren McGavin like the snake that tempted Eve. McGavin's quite good in the part but the character is appallingly drawn. Frankie has a shrew of a wife in a wheelchair, (an over-the-top Eleanor Parker), and a beautiful, sweet girl who loves him, (Kim Novak, never lovelier). It's a film full of good intentions and there is some fine camerawork from Sam Leavitt but it's poorly written and you get the impression the whole cast are fighting against the material, though Sinatra is outstanding and not just in the cold turkey scenes. In the end, it's the kind of picutre you might admire but not really like and I don't rate it very highly in the Preminger canon.
No comments:
Post a Comment