Movie Review: Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, directed by Alex Gibney (2015)

Poster for Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, directed by Alex Gibney, 2015. I love that photo of Frank.

Frank Sinatra, circa 1961. Frank wore hats better than anyone.

An intense Frank Sinatra in the studio.

Frank Sinatra, 1970's. Note his trademark orange pocket square-orange was his favorite color.

Frank Sinatra is one of the major figures in 20^th century American entertainment. Few figures before or since have held the public’s imagination for as long as Sinatra did. Sinatra was a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, from the time he emerged as a singer with the Tommy Dorsey band in the early 1940’s until his death in 1998. 2015 is the centennial of Sinatra’s birth, and nearly twenty years after his death Sinatra remains firmly entrenched in American pop culture. 

The 2015 HBO documentary Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All offers a four-hour glimpse into Sinatra’s life. The documentary takes its structure from the set list of Sinatra’s 1971 retirement concert. (Sinatra came out of retirement in 1973.) The film’s premise is that the songs Sinatra chose for his retirement concert reflected an overview of his career. I agree with that premise, and the idea behind that premise makes the documentary more than just a “and then he did this” film. 

I’ve written about Frank Sinatra before, covering his years on the Columbia Records label from 1943-1952, my 10 favorite Sinatra albums, and a piece covering the best Sinatra compilation albums. I’m a huge admirer of Sinatra’s amazing talent. 

All or Nothing at All is directed by Alex Gibney, who also directed the superb documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief for HBO. All or Nothing at All is wonderfully made; it’s a great example of documentary making at its finest. The research into Sinatra’s life is deep, and Gibney and his team have unearthed superb video and audio recordings of Sinatra talking candidly about his life and career. There’s a lot of wonderful material on Sinatra’s early life in Hoboken, and his rise to fame signing with the Tommy Dorsey band. Early film clips show how revolutionary Sinatra’s singing style was. Sinatra’s voice was extremely intimate, as he seduces the listener through his ballad singing. It’s easy to see why women went nuts for him. 

The first two hours of All or Nothing at All take us through Sinatra’s rise in the 1940’s to his decline in the early 1950’s, when he was battling vocal problems, more competition from singers like Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Vic Damone, Johnnie Ray, and Eddie Fisher, and a relationship with Ava Gardner best described as tempestuous and doomed. By the end of 1952 Sinatra had been dumped by his record label and MGM had dropped his movie contract. It seemed as though he was headed for the has-been pile. 

The second part of the documentary covers Sinatra’s career from his remarkable comeback in 1953 to his retirement concert in 1971. 1953 was a pivotal year for Sinatra, as he signed a contract with Capitol Records, where he met the arranger Nelson Riddle and created the classic songs and albums that have made him a legend. 1953 was also the year that Sinatra played the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, one of his finest acting performances, which deservedly won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I wish that All or Nothing at All focused a little more on Sinatra’s films. Sinatra was a truly talented actor who delivered a number of excellent performances in films like From Here to Eternity, Suddenly, The Man with the Golden Arm, Guys and Dolls, Pal Joey, Some Came Running, and The Manchurian Candidate. But that’s a small quibble.

All or Nothing at All focuses on many of Sinatra’s personal relationships, and there are excellent interviews with Frank’s first wife Nancy, the mother of his three children. The treatment of Sinatra’s other wives was a little more problematic for me. I found Gina Gershon’s voiceover narration of Ava Gardner’s writings to be terribly overdone, and there was just way too much about Mia Farrow, which got boring for me pretty quickly. There’s also just one cursory mention of Sinatra’s fourth wife, Barbara Marx, whose marriage to Frank lasted longer than his other three marriages combined. 

The documentary doesn’t shy away from controversy, covering Sinatra’s famous feud with gossip columnist Lee Mortimer, whom Sinatra knocked out in 1947, after Mortimer had called Sinatra a Communist in his column. Sinatra’s dislike of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t mentioned, but you can hear him express his feelings towards her in live recordings in the 1950’s and 1960’s. (He was fond of calling her “The Chinless Wonder.”) The film also covers Sinatra’s associations with the Mafia, and his acquaintance with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Sinatra’s children say point blank that Giancana and the Mob tipped the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy by making sure that Illinois ended up in the Kennedy column. What no one ever mentions about the 1960 election is that Kennedy had enough electoral votes to win the election even if he had lost Illinois. Sinatra was very close to JFK, and organized his official Inaugural gala. Eventually Sinatra fell out with JFK after Bobby Kennedy warned his brother to steer clear of Sinatra due to his Mob connections. JFK then canceled a planned trip to stay with Sinatra in Palm Springs, and stayed with Bing Crosby (a Republican!) instead. 

All or Nothing at All does a superb job of focusing on Sinatra’s politics, and his personal beliefs. Sinatra was a staunch Democrat in the 1940’s, who campaigned tirelessly for FDR’s fourth term in 1944, and was an unstinting champion of civil rights for African-Americans long before it was fashionable. The FBI investigated Sinatra for decades, not only because of his Mafia connections, but also because he was regarded as a liberal who might be a Communist. Sinatra gradually grew more conservative, eventually supporting Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The movie makes a little too much of Sinatra’s political switch, hinting that his support of Republican candidates was linked to his rejection by the Kennedys. I disagree with that. Sinatra worked very hard for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, appearing at a rally at the Houston Astrodome with Humphrey just two days before the election, and filming a TV ad in support of Humphrey. Sinatra endorsed his friend Ronald Reagan in 1970 when Reagan was running for re-election as Governor of California. In the documentary, Sinatra says that he has been friends with Reagan since 1943. Sinatra was no fan of the hippie culture, and that combined with his personal friendship with Reagan likely started his drift rightward. Sinatra endorsed Richard Nixon’s re-election bid in 1972, but due to Democratic nominee George McGovern’s unpopularity, there was a very large “Democrats for Nixon” group that year, so Sinatra’s support of Nixon wasn’t that unusual. I think Sinatra did get more conservative as he got older, but I also think his shift to the right was greatly influenced by his friendship with Ronald Reagan. 

What amazes me about the richness of Frank Sinatra’s life is that All or Nothing at All is a four hour documentary, and yet there’s still so much more of his life that could be covered. Granted, I’m a huge Sinatraphile, and I understand that four hours might be plenty for most people. But there are gaps, as All or Nothing at All offers only a cursory glance at Sinatra’s career post-1971. That isn’t the biggest loss, since Sinatra’s cultural impact was greatest during the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, but still, Sinatra lived for another 27 years. 

I think that the people interviewed for All or Nothing at All did an excellent job of articulating Sinatra’s importance, but there were three Sinatra experts I wish had been a part of the project. I’m a huge fan of Michael Feinstein’s singing and his tireless advocacy for the music of the Great American Songbook. There’s no one who knows more about the songs of that era that Michael Feinstein, and he was a terrific commentator on this year’s American Masters documentary on Bing Crosby. I think Feinstein would have been a great addition to All or Nothing at All. I was also annoyed that two of the best authors about Sinatra’s music weren’t interviewed. Will Friedwald, who wrote the excellent book Sinatra! The Song is You: A Singer’s Art, and Charles Granata, who wrote the superb Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording, were nowhere to be found in the documentary. Who knows, maybe Granata and Friedwald didn’t want to be part of All or Nothing at All, but I would have enjoyed a little bit more content about Sinatra’s singing style and his phrasing. 

Something that struck me while watching film clips of Sinatra sing is how much charisma the man had. You simply cannot take your eyes off of him. It’s only in film clips that you can really see how strikingly blue his eyes were, photos don’t seem to quite capture the color. Even as he aged, Sinatra remained an extremely handsome man, always dapper, with his usual orange pocket square. (Orange was Sinatra’s favorite color.)

Quibbles aside, All or Nothing at All is a fascinating look at one of the most interesting artists of the 20^th century, and a man whose contribution to singing will be deeply felt in centuries to come.

Movie Review: Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins (1959)

Gregory Peck, looking dashing in uniform as Dwight Towers in On the Beach, 1959.

Anthony Perkins, Gregory Peck, and nuclear scientist Fred Astaire.

The Coca-Cola bottle sending the Morse code signals in On the Beach.

A lighter moment on the set with Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, and producer/director Stanley Kramer.

Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, 1959.

Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach was one of the first Hollywood movies to take a serious look at the dangers of nuclear warfare. Based on the 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, On the Beach takes place in the then-future of 1964, after a nuclear war has destroyed nearly all of the life on the planet. Radioactive fallout is slowly spreading south, and On the Beach follows a group of people in Australia, which is the only place in the world that is still inhabited by humans. 

Gregory Peck plays Dwight Towers, the captain of the Sawfish, an American nuclear submarine. The Sawfish survived the war and heads to Australia. Towers’ liaison with the Australian Navy is Peter Holmes, played by Anthony Perkins. Holmes has a wife and baby, and he struggles with the realization that they will all soon die. His wife is in denial about their situation, and doesn’t want to discuss it. Holmes introduces Towers to several of his friends, including the alcoholic Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) and the alcoholic scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire). Towers has a wife and two children in the United States, and although he knows it is highly likely that they are dead, he still talks about them in the present tense. Towers and Moria start spending more time together, and eventually their relationship becomes romantic. 

Meanwhile, naval communications in Australia are picking up Morse code signals from San Diego. The signals are gibberish, but on the possibility that it could be a survivor, they dispatch the Sawfish to check it out. But on their way to San Diego, the Sawfish heads as far north as possible to see if radioactive levels have dropped. Julian Osborn goes along on the trip as the head scientist, and he confirms that radioactive levels are still very high. I was surprised at how little of the movie took place on the submarine. I thought most of the movie would be focused on their journey northward and then to San Diego, but they get to Alaska in about two minutes. The Sawfish stops by San Francisco on their way to San Diego, and one of the most moving moments in the film is the montage of crew members looking through the periscope at a totally uninhabited city. One crewman from the Sawfish, Ralph Swain, is from San Francisco, and he leaves the submarine to return to his home. An oddly moving moment is the conversation that Towers and Swain have the next morning as the Sawfish prepares to depart. Towers is speaking over the loudspeaker of the submarine, so all we see is Swain sitting on shore talking to a submarine periscope. It’s funny and sad at the same time, a moment that seems so surreal, yet the emotion is heightened as we know that Swain’s conversation with Towers will be the last contact he has with another human being before he dies from fallout. 

The Sawfish tracks the Morse code signal to a refinery in San Diego. One of the crew is sent ashore to investigate and find the signal. He finds that the signal is coming from a Coca-Cola bottle that has fallen and gotten stuck in a window shade. As the breeze moves the window shade, the bottle strikes the telegraph keys, sending the nonsense gibberish messages. The last hope for any survivors has been dashed. 

The submarine returns to Australia and the men wait out their inevitable fate. Osborn has always had a passion for cars, so he enters a car race and wins. It’s the most suicidal car race ever seen on film, as drivers deliberately crash their cars to avoid a painful death from nuclear fallout. The government is handing out suicide pills, and Holmes and his wife finally have a realistic conversation about how they will euthanize their baby before killing themselves. Osborn commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, sitting at the wheel of the race car he loved. Towers and Moira know that they have little time left. The remaining crew of the Sawfish vote to head back to the United States, even though they know they will die before they make it home. Towers commands the ship on its final voyage, and Moira watches from a hill as Towers and the Sawfish depart. 

On the Beach is a bleak film. There is no glimmer of hope for mankind, no way out of the terrible situation the characters find themselves in. One of the questions the movie asks is: how would you spend your last days on earth? Personally, I would rather be in the arms of Ava Gardner than on a doomed submarine. But that’s just me.

All of the performances in On the Beach are excellent. Gregory Peck is perfectly cast as the stoic Dwight Towers, who never panics in the face of a terrible future. If I were on a submarine as the world was ending, there’s really no one I’d rather have be in charge than Gregory Peck. Ava Gardner is very well cast as the alcoholic Moira, who sees in Peck a final chance at some happy moments. While it might seem unbelievable that Dwight and Moira would embark on a romantic relationship, the fact that they are played by the superbly handsome Greg Peck and the delectable Ava Gardner makes it seem obvious why they would like each other. On the Beach was Peck and Gardner’s third and final movie together. They also co-starred in The Great Sinner in 1949 and The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1952. Peck and Gardner have an obvious chemistry in their scenes together. 

Anthony Perkins is touching as the officer with a wife and a young baby. A baby is always a symbol of hope for the future, but in On the Beach we know that there will be no future for this baby. Perkins brings his all-American boy next door charm to the role, and he’s very convincing in the part. A year after On the Beach, Perkins would star as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which forever changed his on screen image. Hitchcock saw that Perkins’s off-kilter charm just needed a slight twist to seem super creepy. Although Psycho was a highlight of Anthony Perkins’s movie career, it also typecast him as a bad guy.

On the Beach is a rare non-musical film role for Fred Astaire. He does a good job as the morose scientist, even though his toupee is distractingly awful. Astaire looks so much older in On the Beach than he did in Silk Stockings and Funny Face, both released just two years before On the Beach. The character that Astaire plays was written as a much younger man in his 20’s in the novel. That makes a little more sense given his love of race cars. But Astaire brings touching moments to the part. When Perkins is worried about his wife and baby, Astaire says “At least you have someone to worry about.” 

One thing I didn’t understand about the movie is what nationality is everyone supposed to be? Peck is obviously an American, but what about the characters that Perkins, Astaire, and Gardner play? Are they all supposed to be Australians? Thankfully no one attempts an accent, although Astaire does pronounce some words very strangely, as though he suddenly remembered his character wasn’t American. 

Stanley Kramer does a good job of directing On the Beach, and I liked his use of titled camera angles to emphasize the surreal circumstances the characters find themselves in. There’s ambiguity in On the Beach, as we never learn how the nuclear war started, or which side dropped the first bomb. Ultimately, that’s irrelevant to the story, which was Kramer’s point-every side loses in a nuclear war. Kramer was most famous for serious films that dealt with important topics of the day. His credits as a producer include Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Wild One, and The Caine Mutiny. As a director, his most famous films are The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The least successful aspect of On the Beach was the ridiculously repetitive score by Ernest Gold, which will make you really sick of “Waltzing Matilda” by the time you get half an hour into the movie. Oddly enough, Gold won a Golden Globe for his score for On the Beach, and the score was also nominated for an Oscar. Gold would win the Oscar the following year for his score for Exodus. Trivia note: Gold was married to Marni Nixon, who famously dubbed many female stars’ singing voices, including Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, and Natalie Wood in West Side Story.

On the Beach is an excellent movie from an era in which the threat of nuclear destruction was at its highest, and I strongly recommend it.