Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280130 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-11
• Released on: 2008-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312362263
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Santopietro, who spent two decades as the manager of two dozen Broadway shows, has previously delivered well-received biographical career assessments of Doris Day and Barbra Streisand. Although Sinatra is covered in countless books, including several focusing on his films, Santopietro's approach attempts to seamlessly blend Sinatra's life, movies and public persona. Sinatra's tough-guy behavior masked a wounding tenderness, observed ex-wife Mia Farrow, and an underlying thesis of this book is that a similar quality permeated his onscreen characters, confident and brash, yet very often vulnerable. Striving for honest critiques and a witty, encyclopedic coverage, Santopietro begins with Sinatra's 1935 short subjects; dances through the grandiose 1940s MGM musicals; documents Sinatra's professional and personal despair and decline in such giant turkey disasters as The Kissing Bandit (1948); and analyzes his Oscar-winning comeback in From Here to Eternity (1953). The book verges on the speculative (Sinatra sensed...) as it bounces from heavy hype (one of the immortals) to pseudo-hip—in a writing style that sometimes works and sometimes simply annoys. Despite such lapses, this mammoth movie compendium, filled with forgotten facts, 53 b&w photos and a detailed filmography, is certain to satisfy Sinatra's legions of fans. (Nov. 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley The chairmanship of Frank Sinatra's fan club, an exalted position the occupancy of which seems to be in an eternal state of flux, for the moment clearly belongs to Tom Santopietro, who works in the New York theater but moonlights as biographer and admirer of singers who also act. Having previously focused his attention on Doris Day and Barbra Streisand, he now turns to Sinatra, for whom his admiration seems to know no limits: "As Katharine Hepburn said of herself, 'Whatever it is, I've got it.' So, too, did Frank Sinatra the film actor, over an incredible fifty-four-year run of full-length motion pictures ranging from 1941 through 1995. The greatest male pop singer in the history of America, he had evolved from a pleasant lightweight performer on film to the most versatile male presence in movies, equally at home in a first-class musical such as On the Town or in the heaviest of dramas, like The Man with the Golden Arm. In his seventy-one feature film appearances, Frank Sinatra crafted a body of work unparalleled in American film history in its versatility. No other actor in Hollywood history had ever ranged so widely and so believably over such a long period of time. He may have made quite a few movies of little or no discernible merit, but as director George Sidney flatly declared: 'There were no heights he couldn't reach.' " Santopietro's enthusiasm is admirable, but no one who knows Sinatra's films is likely to find it infectious or persuasive. Yes, Sinatra did appear in a remarkable variety of movies and roles, and occasionally -- especially in "On the Town," "From Here to Eternity," "Suddenly" and "The Manchurian Candidate" -- he was very good, but of those 71 movies, these four are the only ones likely to be of much lasting interest. Unlike most actors, who come to the movies without reputations and are able to shape their cinematic identities over time, Sinatra came to Hollywood a full-blown celebrity, one of the most recognizable people in the country if not the planet, and he spent the rest of his movie career playing himself, which is to say that his movies may be varied in subject, mood and theme, but the character whom Sinatra plays in them is always Frank Sinatra. This is in stark contrast to other prominent male actors who were more or less contemporaneous with Sinatra: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, to name four who come immediately to mind, not to mention an even larger contingent of Brits, from Alec Guinness to John Gielgud to Sean Connery to Michael Caine to James Mason. It is in the nature of movies that the audience rarely if ever completely loses sight of the real person who is the actor up there on the screen, but some actors are able to lose themselves in their characters in ways that Sinatra rarely could. This is due partly to the huge identity he had achieved outside the movies and partly to complete self-absorption, but it limits his film performances in ways that Santopietro only occasionally acknowledges. Sinatra came to the movies, of course, because by 1941 he was the idol of countless teen-aged girls -- known in those distant days as "bobby-soxers," for the short socks that were part of their obligatory uniform -- as a result of his singing, first with Harry James's big band, then with Tommy Dorsey's, then on his own. Few American musical performers have enjoyed the kind of out-of-control celebrity that was his for a few years, and it was a matter of course that Hollywood would come calling, just as a decade and a half later it came calling for Elvis Presley. He made 10 movies between 1935 and 1945, but did not distinguish himself until the release that same year of "Anchors Aweigh," a good-natured wartime diversion in which he had the good fortune to be paired with Gene Kelly, who taught him a great deal about movie acting generally and dancing specifically. Interestingly, Sinatra is nowhere to be found in the movie's most famous and durable scene, a four-minute sequence in which Kelly dances with the cartoon mouse, Jerry; the scene was re-introduced to moviegoers 30 years later in "That's Entertainment!" and proved to have lost none its luster. Sinatra made two more notable musicals, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "On the Town," both of which were released in 1949 and in both of which Kelly also appeared. Then Sinatra went into what appeared to be terminal decline, in part because of bad publicity attendant to his famously tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner, in larger part because everything seemed to be falling apart; he "faced a future with no record company, no agent, no movie studio contract, and a back-tax bill of nearly a hundred thousand dollars." The country's tastes in popular music were beginning to change. Sinatra's silken, intimate style was falling out of favor and rock and roll was dimly visible on the horizon. Then, as every movie fan (and/or Sinatra fan) knows, in 1953 Sinatra somehow managed to persuade Harry Cohn at Columbia to let him play Angelo Maggio in the studio's adaptation of James Jones's bestselling novel From Here to Eternity. His performance turned out to be brilliant, and he won an Academy Award for it. He was back, both as movie star and as singer. The albums he recorded in the 1950s for Capitol Records, accompanied by Nelson Riddle, are absolutely extraordinary; it is no exaggeration to say that these 318 tracks may well be the finest ever made by an American pop singer, and they are certain to last far longer than even the best of his movies. He stayed on top from then until his death in 1998. During the 1950s and '60s he made several worthwhile films -- the aforementioned along with "The Man with the Golden Arm," "High Society," "The Joker Is Wild" and "Von Ryan's Express" -- but by as early as 1960 "laziness would now be exhibited with increasing frequency," as Santopietro quite awkwardly puts it. He continues: "It was the start of personality acting as opposed to acting on film as a craft, and anyone doubting the shift need only take a look at Marriage on the Rocks, Assault on a Queen, and Dirty Dingus Magee. The key point to remember is that it wasn't a result of Sinatra's not caring about his movies. Rather, as his persona cast a larger and larger shadow over the landscape of American pop culture, his demeanor on set changed from impatient to short-tempered. If Frank felt one take was enough, then everybody else needed to see it that way as well. It was Sinatra's way or the highway." As that indicates, Santopietro does not hesitate to pan the many bad movies that Sinatra made -- not merely the three mentioned, but also "The Kissing Bandit," "Double Dynamite," "Not As a Stranger," "The Pride and the Passion" and "Never So Few," for starters -- yet he is inexplicably forgiving about the two musicals in which Sinatra appeared in the 1950s, "Guys and Dolls" and "Pal Joey." As a 20-year veteran of Broadway, Santopietro surely knows that the filmed versions of these two classic stage musicals were pathetic bowdlerizations of the originals. In both, Sinatra deserves credit for trying, but the films themselves are so bad that no singer or actor could rescue them. Santopietro's eagerness to give Sinatra the benefit of the doubt at just about every turn is mildly appealing, but it's difficult to imagine that Sinatra in Hollywood will be of interest to anyone except the most incurably addicted Sinatraholic. His prose has little grace, and none at all when he lapses into a mannered breeziness that is meant, one supposes, to echo Sinatra's own voice; thus we must suffer through the likes of "Required to fake being drunk, his acting of 'acting' inebriated is, well, sorta, kinda okay," and "Well, what the hell," and "Sinatra may have been through with starring roles on the big screen, but he sure as hell was not about to retire, not by a long shot." Et cetera. A more serious problem is that Santopietro insists on recapitulating, in excruciating detail, the plots of every single movie in which Sinatra appears. These précis are tiresome in the extreme and add nothing to the reader's understanding or appreciation of Sinatra's acting career. Like biographies of sports figures in which every game and every play is recounted, Sinatra in Hollywood ultimately collapses under the weight of its own triviality.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Sinatra’s reputation as America’s greatest pop singer has overshadowed his equally impressive accomplishments as an actor. Santopietro aims to rectify that situation in a biography emphasizing Sinatra’s movies. From his earliest roles, audiences responded well to his screen image of the tough-yet-vulnerable loner, which became his public persona as well. When his recording career hit the skids—along with his movie career, after such bombs as The Kissing Bandit—his Oscar-winning turn in From Here to Eternity put him permanently back on track. Equally impressive roles in such acclaimed films as The Man with the Golden Arm and The Manchurian Candidate followed, and if he began to stop caring by the mid-1960s, his later movies, especially with the Rat Pack, have their charms. With generally incisive readings of the films and a firm grasp of the familiar biographical material, Santopietro makes a compelling argument for Sinatra’s status as a great actor too often saddled with sub-par material, who, contrary to his reputation for indifference, took his film work seriously, knowing that movie stardom “could ensure his immortality.” --Gordon Flagg

Customer Reviews

Buy this Book!
FINALLY, a book for film buffs and Sinatra fans that does justice to the Sinatra mystique and encompasses the full range of his acting career! Tom Santopietro really knows film, celebrities, and cultural history and weaves a narrative combining all three that gives us great insight and affection for Sinatra, the private man and the public talent. This is a book that belongs in the hands of every fan of Ol' Blue Eyes! As with his prior books on Doris Day and Barbara Streisand, Santopietro's work is both entertaining and worthy of a permanent place in the collection of anyone who's a serious fan of 20th century film.

A Fair Assessment
Mr. Santopietro's account of Sinatra's Hollywood years is very entertaining, insightful and often quite funny, especially when describing some of the ludicrous plotting or production problems of some of The Chairman's films. It also deals with Sinatra's personal woes and triumphs as well as his phenomenal recording career. Although concentrating specifically on his films, the book offers much analysis on Sinatra's shining years both on and off the screen. It is a great read for any fan of film in general or Ol' Blue Eyes. Santopietro is especially fair in showing a balanced view of the great entertainer, warts and all.

The only issue I had is the author's often preachy political correctness when complaining of negative racial stereotypes prevalent in films during Hollywood's heyday. Historians and biographers need to stop using 21st-century standards to judge the past and those who came before us. In 50 years, I'm sure some biographer will have something bad to say about our standards today even though we strongly defend those same standards now. Any film fan reading the book knows the stereotypes regrettably existed and doesn't want to believe that the author assumes all readers are blind to, or ignorant of, the past. Times have mercifully changed, but please don't gratuitously preach to the reader about a history that can't be re-written.

For the love of Sinatra
Tom Santopietro's book on Sinatra's films goes against the grain of what everyone before him has said. Apparently Sinatra's biggest fanboy, Santopietro can't find anything wrong with any of Sinatra's performances and consistently praises the chairman of the board no matter how lazy or contemptible his acting gets. If you loved Frankie's daughter's book about her father, then you'll love this one. When someone writes ANYTHING good about "Dirty Dingus Magee", you know you can't trust their judgment.