The Man with the Golden Arm
Otto Preminger (1955)
After serving a prison sentence and receiving treatment for drug addiction in the ‘Narcotic Farm’ in Lexington, Kentucky, Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) returns home. Home is a run-down area of Chicago, where he lives with his wheelchair-bound wife, Zosh (Eleanor Parker), in a cramped apartment within a tenement building. Frankie soon bumps into other old acquaintances: Sparrow (Arnold Stang), a conman as diminutive as his name suggests, who makes a living selling stray dogs; Zero Schwiefka (Robert Strauss), for whose illegal card game Frankie used to be the dealer; Louie Foromowski (Darren McGavin), the pusher who supplied him with drugs; and Molly (Kim Novak), a (young) old flame of Frankie’s, who works as a hostess in a local strip club and lives in the apartment downstairs from him and Zosh. Frankie is determined to put his past behind him. In the Narcotic Farm they told him he was good enough to play drums in a professional band.
Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, adapted by Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer from Nelson Algren’s 1949 novel of the same name, is all about Frankie’s losing battle to escape the legacy of his former life and into a better one. Sam Leavitt’s cinematography – tight interiors; occasional, and therefore unexpected, rapid camera movements – captures the protagonist’s hemmed-in and increasingly perilous situation. (The film was evidently shot in a studio rather than on location, which adds to the claustrophobia.) Preminger’s treatment of the material is self-consciously modern and edgy, though. Saul Bass’s animated opening titles sequence is fine but the director relies too heavily on Elmer Bernstein’s itchy, insistent, dissonant music. More than one character falls melodramatically to their death from high up in the tenement building. Leavitt’s visuals also include juddering zooms into Frankie’s eyes.
Yet those eyes repay the camera’s close attention: Frank Sinatra’s performance as the title character is one of his very best. (Frankie’s golden arm refers to his skill as a card dealer and potential as a drummer, as well as to his seemingly incorrigible – and, for Louie, lucrative – habit of injecting heroin.) The details of the character’s anxiety – flexing his knuckles, nervous movements of his fingers on his face – are conventional enough but remarkably authentic. They express mounting tension to a degree that’s probably possible only when an actor is as physically relaxed as Sinatra is here. Although a couple of Sparrow’s canines have screen charisma, they’re outshone by the star’s skinny underdog quality. You keep rooting for Frankie. Sinatra makes you feel both his hope – his hoping against hope – and the weight of, to mix animal metaphors, the monkey on his back.
Otherwise, the acting is a hotchpotch. In the supporting cast, there’s good work from Darren McGavin and from Emile Meyer as a businesslike but rueful police captain; there are also rote and overdone contributions from Robert Strauss as Schwiefka and other heavies. The two leading ladies are bizarre polar opposites. Eleanor Parker, too grand and senior for the role of Frankie’s wife, acts up a storm: it’s surprising that Frankie wasn’t in prison for strangling Zosh (whose professed paralysis is soon revealed as tactical – a means of putting moral pressure on her husband to stay with her). Kim Novak’s beauty is, as usual, almost literally statuesque. Whenever she tries to act, she’s stiffly lethargic and, unlike Eleanor Parker, doesn’t look to be enjoying herself at all. Even so, Novak is sometimes oddly touching. Her presence is a distinctive, even relieving, aspect of the modernity Otto Preminger strains for.
30 August 2023