"Some Came Running" with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. Sinatra's best film, its a stylish and great paced transformation of James Jones' wonderful novel.
Spurred on by the sales and the critical acclaim of his best-selling From Here to Eternity, James Jones set out to write yet another great American novel. The result was Some Came Running, the story of a war veteran with literary aspirations who returns in 1948 to his hometown of Parkman, Illinois, after a failed writing career. While it wasn't quite the masterpiece Jones hoped it would be, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in a bid to duplicate the success of the multi-Academy Award winning film adaptation of From Here to Eternity (1953), optioned the 1,200-plus-page book and cast Frank Sinatra as the lead, Dave Hirsh. Sinatra approved Dean Martin for the role of his gambling pal, Bama Dillert, in what would be their first film together. Martin, who had recently split from a partnership with Jerry Lewis, was just beginning to prove himself as an actor and would win some of the best notices of his career for his performance here. Shirley MacLaine was cast as the adorable floozy Ginny Moorehead, who falls for Hirsh. MacLaine garnered her first Academy Award nomination which she credited to Sinatra for his insistence on the film's ending being changed. Hailed as a masterpiece of American cinema, Some Came Running was a box office success, earning $4.3 million in rentals and being ranked by Variety as the 10th highest-earning film of 1958.
Highly admired in France and Europe and remaing a cult film to date among film-makers and audiences alike, Some Came Running remains a work of some stature in American cinema. Despite this it will be somewhat of a late arrival on the DVD format when it is eventually released on May 13th 2008.
Martin Scorsese included a clip from the film for his A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies; the film's final playground scene, to Scorsese, remains one of the best and most expressive uses of CinemaScope in American Cinema.
The scene that Scorsese speaks of is sheer aesthetic genius. Every time I watch it I enter a trance-like state that can only be described as hypnotic. It's a MUST see for all filmmakers.
