Some Came Running

Director: Vincente Minnelli

1958 / 137min / 35mm

The Rat Pack have their first big-screen outing in small-town Indiana in this adaptation of James Jones’s novel of postwar comedown and disillusion, with Frank Sinatra as ex-GI Dave Hirsch, returning to his sleepy Ohio River hometown where he’ll move between the upstanding world inhabited by his jeweler brother (Arthur Kennedy) and school teacher girlfriend (Martha Hyer), and the party on the other side of the tracks overseen by laid-back gambler Alabama (Dean Martin) and Ginny (Shirley MacLaine), the doting low-class dame who followed Dave into town from Chicago. Reaches heights of cinematic elation in its fairground-by-night climax, and depths of real tragedy in its aftermath. One of the greatest American films of the 1950s.