Frank Capra (1959)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when competition for the Best Original Song Oscar was stiffer than it is now, Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote three of the winning songs. They all became part of Frank Sinatra’s repertoire and outlasted the now largely forgotten films in which they first featured. Bobby Darin sang ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ in Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963); Sinatra performed the numbers, as well as starring, in both other films – ‘All the Way’ in The Joker is Wild (1957) and ‘High Hopes’ in A Hole in the Head. With altered lyrics but still sung by Sinatra, ‘High Hopes’ became all the more famous the following year as John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign song. A Hole in the Head is showing at BFI this month because of its obscurity rather than its celebrated song. The film is part of ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’, a selection of the last or late movies of front-rank directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age: it’s implicit in the selection that these movies are less well known than most of their directors’ work. Frank Capra made A Pocketful of Miracles (1961) subsequently; A Hole in the Head has a slot in ‘The Old Man is Still Here’ presumably because it marked a prolific film-maker’s return to Hollywood after an absence of eight years. There seems no other good reason for its inclusion: this is definitely not a neglected masterpiece.
Adapted by Arnold Schulman from his 1957 Broadway stage play of the same name, A Hole in the Head is a heartwarming comedy-drama – that’s the idea anyway. Years ago, Tony Manetta (Sinatra) emigrated to Florida from the Bronx with two pals, all three of them looking to make their fortune in Miami. One of them succeeded – Jerry Marks (Keenan Wynn) is now a super-rich promoter – but Mendy Yales (George DeWitt) is a cab driver and Tony, though he still has big ideas, has bigger debts. He manages the Garden of Eden hotel but owes the landlord five months’ rent – $5,300 – and has just forty-eight hours to find it if he’s to avoid eviction. As usual when he’s on his uppers, Tony contacts his elder brother in New York. Mario Manetta (Edward G Robinson) runs a clothing business there, with his wife Sophie (Thelma Ritter). He’s Tony’s polar opposite – a hard-working, comfortably off, penny-pinching sourpuss. Mario says no to this latest plea for cash until Tony fibs that his eleven-year-old son, Alvin aka Ally (Eddie Hodges), is sick. Mario and Sophie immediately get on a plane to Florida, only to find that Ally is the picture of health. Mario does eventually agree to loan his brother funds but on two conditions – that Ally comes back to New York to live with his more reliable relatives and that Tony, a widower, marries a wealthy woman. Sophie even has a candidate to fit the bill – an acquaintance called Eloise Rogers (Eleanor Parker), also widowed, who has recently moved to Miami …
Set pieces follow, meant to be amusing and/or touching, actually dispiriting because they’re so predictable. Mario wants to seal the deal with Eloise without delay: she meets him at Tony’s hotel, is soon on the receiving end of a tactless interrogation about her late husband’s finances and makes a swift exit. Even so, Eloise takes to Tony and to Ally, and they to her: it’s soon revealed she lost both her husband and her young son in an accident, that she’s lonely – tired of buying a single lamb chop for dinner – and needs to be needed again. Tony contrives to see Jerry Marks, to pitch his dream of buying land in Florida as the site for a second Disneyland. (Tony’s supposedly cockamamie idea wouldn’t look so cockamamie, of course, by 1971, when Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, FL.) Tony goes greyhound racing with his old pal and one of Jerry’s concubines (Joi Lansing). Anxious to convince Jerry he’s a man of means, he bets the whole $500 he just got in exchange for his Cadillac. The dog wins. He then lets his winnings ride on the next race on – wait for it – Lucky Ally! The dog loses. Rancid plutocrat Jerry shows his true colours by saying what he really thinks of the Disneyland scheme. Tony returns to the Garden of Eden, ashamed and penniless.
His only hope of cash now is sending Ally back to New York with Mario and Sophie, though it breaks Tony’s heart to suggest that. When Ally says he won’t go, Tony lies to the boy that he’s a millstone round his neck – that Tony needs him ‘like a hole in the head’. Ally, who adores his father and calls him ‘champ’, says he’ll never speak again to Tony again. It all comes right in the end, which arrives very suddenly. Tony spends the night pacing up and down outside the hotel. Next morning, Mario, Sophie and Ally set off for the airport but Ally jumps out of the car, runs to find his father on the beach and hugs him tight. Sophie and Mario watch the happy reunion. ‘The poor things,’ says Sophie, ‘they’re so happy and so poor’. Mario corrects his wife – Tony and Ally are ‘broke but not poor: we’re poor’. To confirm his lightning conversion to what-really-matters, Mario tells Sophie they’re going to stay on in Florida for a holiday. Eloise turns up to tell Tony and Ally she has three lamb chops at home.
This film was made when Hollywood casting directors subscribed to the infant-phenomenon school of child acting, with a penchant for well-fed, freckled faces, at least where boys were concerned. Whether or not Eddie Hodges, as an actor, was more than that suggests, is beside the point: Frank Capra expects Hodges simply to work the gears. He’s thoroughly competent – ten-out-of-ten for timing and pointing his lines, for turning emotions on and off – but almost entirely mechanical (see below for a welcome instance of where he’s not). Edward G Robinson and Thelma Ritter aren’t the ideal choices for their ropy roles though Robinson did make me laugh when Mario explains why on visits to Miami he’s never gone on the beach or in the sea (‘You sit there, you get hot. You go in the water, you get cold. You get out, you get hot again …’) Ritter, as always, is expert and likeable but her core of rueful sanity seems at odds with a lot of Sophie’s lines. Keenan Wynn delivers a sharp, sour turn as egomaniac Jerry. Eleanor Parker is better here than she was playing opposite Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) but well-bred Eloise, at this distance in time, comes over as Parker’s trying out for the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965), with the big difference that this time her character ends up on the winning side.
That careless ending brings all the decent people together, emotionally and literally. Conspicuously absent from the beach gathering is a character not so far mentioned. Introducing himself in voiceover at the start, Tony explains:
‘That’s my hotel right there, The Garden of Eden. But like good old Adam, my weakness is Eves. My current Eve is a lulu. She woulda made the serpent eat the apple.’
The lulu is Shirl (Carolyn Jones), who’s on screen a lot during the film’s first hour. She’s usually quite skimpily dressed and often accompanied on the soundtrack by a trumpet wah-wah to underline how sexy she is. Though happy to display Shirl for a while, Frank Capra makes clear this kind of girl is unsuitable for high-grade family entertainment in the longer term. At one point, Tony impulsively suggests that he and Shirl head off together to Cuba; she’s thrilled by the idea; by the time she reports to the Garden of Eden all ready to go, Tony has met Eloise and is nowhere to be seen. Shirl exits the film, leaving only an abusive message to Tony, scrawled in lipstick on a hotel-room mirror. You feel offended for the character and the actress playing her: Carolyn Jones, truly eccentric, shows Shirl a sympathy that Capra and Arnold Schulman withhold.
It was a mostly middle-aged-to-elderly audience in NFT3 for A Hole in the Head. A fair few of us probably sat down hoping to enjoy a nice, old-fashioned picture, forgetting that old-fashioned doesn’t always seem too nice nowadays. Tony pretends to reject Ally so energetically that he slaps the child’s face, a moment that prompted audible alarm in NFT3. I must admit I nearly sniggered at this point – not at the slap itself but at Capra’s immediate, clumsy cut to Eloise’s shocked yet ladylike reaction to it. In any case, I found the disposal of Shirl more offensive because in getting rid of her, the film, unlike Tony when he hits his son, isn’t putting on an act. Despite Capra’s track record, his staging of some of the broader comedy elements – Mario and Sophie’s infantile grown-up son Julius (James Komack) in New York, a dipso hotel guest (Connie Sawyer) – is strenuous. He does better with a running gag involving Edward G Robinson and an uncooperative rocking chair, a variation on Edward Arnold’s fine double act with a rock-hard chair seat in Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You (1938). In the opening credits, the title and the names of Capra and the main actors move across the screen as an aerial advertisement, attached to a Goodyear blimp – an awkward assertion of the film’s CinemaScope credentials. In the closing scene, all those who matter in the story undergo a synchronised change of heart. There are gruesome things in A Hole in the Head from start to finish.
But there’s also Frank Sinatra. He could never be Hamlet or Napoleon or do much in the way of accents. He was usually an underdog Italian-American – still unmistakably that (to Frank Loesser’s fury) when he was Jewish underdog Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (1955). The Jewish characters in Arnold Schulman’s stage play were Italianised for the screen A Hole in the Head, presumably for the leading man’s benefit. though perhaps for Frank Capra’s, too. Yet within his narrow range Sinatra was unbeatable, in drama or comedy. Even here, his combination of wit, charisma and ease on camera alchemises the phony routines he’s put through. This isn’t entirely enjoyable – you’re too aware of the sentimental machinery for it to be that – but it is admirable, sometimes amazing. Van Heusen and Cahn wrote two songs for the film: the first, which Sinatra sings over those opening titles, is an undistinguished ballad (‘All My Tomorrows’) but ‘High Hopes’ is worth waiting for. It’s actually a duet, between Tony and Ally, who begs his father, to do ‘the ant song’. The way that Sinatra blends conversation and melody in what follows is miraculously natural, and Eddie Hodges is at his best during the song. You can tell he’s genuinely having fun doing it. In the second verse, he’s a beat slow coming in with his line and laughs at his mistake. Thank goodness Capra kept this in: it’s the infant phenomenon’s most human, likeable moment.
Few directors make their best films when they’re senior citizens. That gives BFI’s ‘Old Man’ season a somewhat dismal edge even though I won’t be able to resist the swan songs of two of my favourite directors: it’s not as if William Wyler’s The Liberation of L B Jones and George Stevens’ The Only Game in Town (both 1970) regularly crop up on TV. And I won’t easily forget this screening, if only because of what I didn’t see as a result of being at BFI for this film. This was the first time since the year after A Hole in the Head s release that I didn’t watch the Grand National live on television. Despite the fact that, late in life, I’ve really gone off jumps racing, breaking this sixty-plus-years sequence felt like a dereliction of duty. As the Aintree off time approached, I even wondered about going to the NFT3 loo to watch the race on my phone. I did well to stay put – if I hadn’t, I’d have missed ‘High Hopes’ – but doing so also made my guilty conscience worse. Much of the time when the National was being run was occupied by a scene in the film that takes place in Tony Manetta’s office at the hotel, with Tony standing in front of a picture on the office wall. It’s a portrait of a horse. Juxtaposing Frank Sinatra and a horse’s head should really have brought The Godfather amusingly to mind. Instead, that horse on the wall seemed to be giving me a reproachful look.
5 April 2025
