In the late 1960s, the people who thought Frank Sinatra was hip and socially relevant were middle-aged, at least. In a world of Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Easy Rider, no matter how cool Frank tried to become —recording Beatle songs or marrying Mia Farrow— he would always be a 50s cat, a ring-a-ding-ding swinger/Vegas rat packer.
Herein lays the odd appeal of Tony Rome (1967), in which Sinatra is a private detective (yes, that Tony Rome), living in Miami on a small yacht, attracting beautiful women while solving crime.
A feeling takes hold five minutes in: Sinatra has become an anachronism, a stranger in a strange land, but unlike Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the script treats Frank without any sense of displacement. It’s the other people and music that don’t belong.
Tony Rome is not so much a character with a background and intriguing motivations, as he is Sinatra just doing whatever comes to mind…He’s never short of glib comebacks, no matter how badly he has been beaten. His light-colored suits never get ruffled or dirty, regardless of punch-ups, and his obvious toupee remains solidly cemented, impervious to jarring head shots. What are we to make of it?
It’s a star vehicle and Frank makes no attempt to adapt to the times. His tough guy / wisecracking hijinks must have caused peals of laughter when the film screened at Hefner’s Playboy mansion. The audience surely laughed along as Frank mocks hippy music and gay lifestyles. The leering misogyny doesn’t advance the narrative. Quite the opposite.
We won’t appraise the film from a current perspective (that’s unfair), but when framed in the period in which it was made, it still gives out odd vibrations. Consider films that were released during the same year… Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, … Certainly, other aging stars from the 40s and 50s were still performing in the late 60s, but few had Sinatra’s profile and influence. He made this movie the way he wanted it to be made. Simple.
Perhaps the term anachronism doesn’t really apply to film stars (Norma Desmond would agree). They should live in hermetically sealed bubbles, impervious to clocks and events, performing as if unscathed by time, giving out whatever it was that first made us say ‘ahhh’.
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