{"id":4443,"date":"2015-12-11T18:21:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T18:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=4443"},"modified":"2015-12-11T18:21:42","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T18:21:42","slug":"sinatras-films-shattered-the-postwar-myth-of-the-white-american-male","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/sinatras-films-shattered-the-postwar-myth-of-the-white-american-male\/","title":{"rendered":"Sinatra’s films shattered the postwar myth of the white American male"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karen McNally<\/a>, London Metropolitan University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Frank Sinatra\u2019s 100th birthday on December 12 is being celebrated with all the requisite fanfare: Alex Gibney\u2019s HBO documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All<\/a>, CBS’ Sinatra 100 All-Star Grammy Concert<\/a>, exhibits at the Lincoln Center and Grammy Museum, a London Palladium show<\/a> and a number of book publications.<\/p>\n

But while Sinatra was an extraordinary creative force in American popular music, his film career is often an afterthought, damned by the inconsistencies of a dual-career artist.<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s on the screen where Sinatra\u2019s wider cultural significance lies.<\/p>\n

If the 20th century was, as Time publisher Henry Luce termed it<\/a>, \u201cThe American Century,\u201d then Hollywood told the story of a nation reveling in its economic and cultural rise.<\/p>\n

And if Hollywood provided the narrative, then its protagonist was the white American male, frequently depicted as a middle-class, married suburbanite.<\/p>\n

Sinatra, in his films, explored the main tenets of this identity. But unlike many of his contemporaries, he offered a striking, alternative idea<\/a> of masculinity.<\/p>\n

Masculinity, redefined<\/h2>\n

In the 1940s, few would have thought that Frank Sinatra\u2019s screen career would have any sort of lasting influence. Sinatra was often limited to playing implausibly naive characters in RKO and MGM musicals, and both studios attempted to suppress the potent sexuality that Sinatra had harnessed as a musician to induce hysteria among his teenaged fan base (known as bobby soxers<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But even in these musicals, we see the roots of his unconventional screen persona. While military triumph and notions of male bravery were fresh on everyone\u2019s minds, Sinatra played sailors on shore leave whose greatest fear was the opposite sex (Anchors Aweigh and On the Town). In Take Me Out to the Ball Game, he portrayed a singing baseball player lit for audience consumption like a fully fledged glamour girl.<\/p>\n

Sinatra\u2019s screen image constantly challenged the period\u2019s norms, disrupting the postwar obsession with the middle-class white male so incisively laid out in the first seasons of Mad Men<\/a>. He was the antithesis of Gregory Peck\u2019s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a character who symbolized both the trappings \u2013 and trap \u2013 of the American Dream.<\/p>\n

In truth, the country was a mix of classes, races and ethnicities, despite minorities and the poor being relegated to a cultural hinterland. Sinatra, as a high-profile Italian-American, embodied this outsider, the man excluded from America\u2019s postwar suburban success story.<\/p>\n

He starred in 1955\u2019s The Man with the Golden Arm, which tested the limits of Motion Picture Production Code<\/a> censorship through its groundbreaking portrayal of heroin addiction. Playing a poker-dealing junkie named Frankie Machine, Sinatra presented a darker image of America, a world of urban losers who used drugs, alcohol and emotional blackmail as a means of escape, a place where \u2013 as one character puts it \u2013 \u201cEverybody\u2019s a habitual something.\u201d<\/p>\n

America\u2019s postwar masculine ideal was always more myth than reality, and Sinatra reminds us of this in surprising places. Take the 1954 Warner Bros musical Young at Heart. For the first 30 minutes, it\u2019s packed with optimistic self-assurance, as Doris Day and Gig Young court one another in an idyllic Connecticut setting. But the arrival of Sinatra\u2019s working-class musical arranger \u2013 with a name changed from something \u201ca little more Italian\u201d \u2013 transforms the film into a feast of noir melodrama.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n A still from Young at Heart, with Sinatra seated at the piano.<\/span>
\n Warner Bros.<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Vulnerable loners on the margins<\/h2>\n

Meanwhile, Sinatra\u2019s portrayals of postwar outsiders are often tied to the war veteran\u2019s vulnerability. Emotionally expressive male stardom in the 1950s is frequently connected to James Dean\u2019s teenage angst or Marlon Brando\u2019s \u201cHey Stella\u201d yell<\/a>, which depicted male vulnerability through a boyish intensity.<\/p>\n

Sinatra instead has a more mature take, conveying a world-weariness borne of the veteran\u2019s experience. In Some Came Running (1958) he plays a war hero author who, in desperation, marries Shirley MacLaine\u2019s sweet floozy (\u201cI\u2019m just tired of being lonely, that\u2019s all\u201d). And in The Manchurian Candidate he skillfully portrays a Korean war veteran in the midst of a breakdown.<\/p>\n

Even Sinatra\u2019s playboy characters were a direct challenge to the middle-class male ideal that Playboy started promoting in its first issue in 1953. While the magazine repeatedly expressed its admiration for Sinatra\u2019s sexually liberated male lifestyle, describing him as<\/a> \u201csurely the hippest of the hip,\u201d it balked at the kind of working-class persona Sinatra exuded in a film like Pal Joey (1957).<\/p>\n

For Playboy, a man\u2019s refinement was marked by his education and an understated Ivy League style, alongside ownership of<\/a> \u201cthe hi-fi set in mahogany console\u201d and \u201cthe racy little Triumph<\/a>.\u201d Sinatra\u2019s Joey Evans, on the other hand, is an MC who trades sex with Rita Hayworth\u2019s wealthy widow for a share in a nightclub. But Joey\u2019s attempt at sophistication \u2013 donning a smoking jacket and monogrammed slippers \u2013 ensures he remains no more than a gigolo.<\/p>\n

Significantly, in a nod to America\u2019s ultimate outsiders, Sinatra didn\u2019t hesitate to tie his films to the burning issue of the time: civil rights.<\/p>\n

While the US Army remained segregated, Sinatra\u2019s 1945 short The House I Live In<\/a> aimed to teach racial tolerance to a younger generation. And only months after news cameras captured angry white southerners protesting the desegregation of a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sinatra\u2019s Kings Go Forth suggested that racism and inequality weren\u2019t just Southern problems \u2013 they were nationwide afflictions.<\/p>\n

So as you celebrate Sinatra\u2019s 100th birthday by popping in Songs for Swingin’ Lovers<\/a> or In the Wee Small Hours<\/a>, it\u2019s important to remember that his films and on-screen characters also form an essential part of his cultural legacy.<\/p>\n

In peeling away the sanitized sheen of postwar, middle-class America, Sinatra largely succeeded in exposing (to borrow from Frankie Machine) a \u201cdown and dirty\u201d side of masculinity that Hollywood largely ignored.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Karen McNally<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, London Metropolitan University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen McNally, London Metropolitan University Frank Sinatra\u2019s 100th birthday on December 12 is being celebrated with all the requisite fanfare: Alex Gibney\u2019s HBO documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, CBS’ Sinatra 100 All-Star Grammy Concert, exhibits at the Lincoln Center and Grammy Museum, a London Palladium show and a number of book publications. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":4445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[279,7,39,36],"tags":[335,363,316,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4444,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions\/4444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}