Product Description

FRANK SINATRA: THE GOLDEN YEARS COLLECTION THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM Gripping, harrowing, taboo-shattering. The legend shines as a drummer coping with drug abuse. "Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor" (The New Yorker 8/9/93). With Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker. MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS A screwball marriage-go-round. Sinatra, Deborah Kerr and Dean Martin go for a madcap spin in this whoop-for-joy romp about I do, I don’t, and I did what?! NONE BUT THE BRAVE A tale of combat, survival…and of respect between enemies. U.S. Marine Sinatra crash-lands onto a Pacific atoll held by Japanese troops. Sinatra’s powerful directorial debut. SOME CAME RUNNNG Small-town hypocrisy comes into focus in this acclaimed exposé of a mid- American town. From director Vincente Minnelli and the author of From Here to Eternity. Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. THE TENDER TRAP Will a talent agent (Sinatra) dedicated to life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit be snared by love? Maybe yes when Manhattan cutie Debbie Reynolds sets her sights on him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19112 in DVD
• Brand: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 5
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

Features

• FRANK SINATRA: THE GOLDEN YEARS COLLECTIONTHE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM Gripping, harrowing, taboo-shattering. The legend shines as a drummer coping with drug abuse. ?Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor? (The New Yorker 8/9/93). With Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker.MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS A screwball marriage-go-round. Sinatra, Deborah Kerr and Dean Martin go for a madcap spin in this who

Amazon.com
Frank Sinatra was in his most adventurous era of movie acting in the time represented by Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years Collection, a five-movie set from Warner. He'd already won his Oscar and bounced back from a career slump, and was ready to take on some challenges in the mid-1950s to early 60s. If not everything in this box is pure gold, it nevertheless shows off Sinatra when he was like a jazz musician with great chops, willing to experiment and push himself to the limit. This is nowhere more evident than in his Oscar-nominated performance in The Man with the Golden Arm, a searing 1955 turn as a heroin addict who falls into old habits after trying to get clean. Sinatra is touchingly matched with Kim Novak under the unblinking gaze of director Otto Preminger, who used the film's then-shocking subject matter to beat down the walls of Hollywood's restrictive Production Code. Elmer Bernstein's cool score and a gallery of eccentric supporting actors add to the movie's syncopated allure. Sinatra might be even better in the brilliant Some Came Running (1958), Vincente Minnelli's visually dynamic, emotionally sensitive look at a writer and lost soul (that's Sinatra) coming back to hometown Middle America after World War II. Seeing the rampant hypocrisy of the "good life," he naturally resorts to the company of a floozy (Shirley MacLaine, Oscar-nominated) and a misogynist gambler (Dean Martin). Minnelli's staging of the climax, at a carnival, is one of the great dramatic uses of widescreen in movies. The Tender Trap (1955), on the other hand, is very much a stagebound ode to conformity: Frankie is a ring-a-ding bachelor (living in one of the great movie bachelor pads, worth a look for archivists trying to re-create an era), tamed by organized Debbie Reynolds. Well, at least you get to hear the title song a lot.

The real surprise of the set is None but the Brave, Sinatra's only directing job, a WWII movie from 1965 that has a generally low critical reputation. Certainly its outline is a fairly obvious anti-war parable (a plane-wrecked crew of U.S. soldiers confronts a forgotten contingent of Japanese on a small island, and work out a truce), but the movie is made with intelligence and passion. Sinatra takes a number of risks, beginning with his non-starring role and the treatment of the Japanese as complex characters, and the conclusion is as bitter about the nature of war as any of the counterculture films that would follow. The final disc, Marriage on the Rocks (1965), is strictly a throw-in, a sitcom scenario with Sinatra and bored wife Deborah Kerr mixing up their married lives with best pal Dean Martin. The mild comedy includes Nancy Sinatra and the delectable sight of Frank go-go dancing in a rock club. That rock beat signals the decline of Sinatra's reign, but this set provides a glimpse of ol' Blue Eyes at his peak. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

4 Of Frank Sinatra's Greatest Films + 1 Mediocre One
"Golden Era" is kind of a misnomer for this DVD set, as only 3 of the films are truly from Frank Sinatra's golden era: the mid to late 1950's.
However, the 3 films here from that era, "Tender Trap" (1955), "Man With the Golden Arm" (1955), and "Some Came Running" (1958) are all SUPERB!

"The Tender Trap" (Color; 1955) is a delightful comedy, with a screenplay (by Julius J. Epstein) not unlike Neil Simon's future plays, and features great chemistry between Sinatra and co-star Debbie Reynolds (4 1/2 out of 5 stars).

"The Man With the Golden Arm" (In film noir-ish B&W; 1955) is well-known as, perhaps, Sinatra's greatest performance as an actor. He was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Ernest Borgnine in the "safer" film, "Marty". Directed by Otto Preminger, it is an excellent film about heroin addiction, and was extremely realistic by 1955 standards. It was the FIRST film ever to tackle this subject seriously and it does not demonize the drug user as might be expected for a film that is over 50 years old (5 out of 5 stars).

"Some Came Running" (Color; 1958) Directed by Vincente Minnelli and one of Martin Scorcese's favorite films, this film HAS to be seen in WIDESCREEN to be fully appreciated! Also starring Shirley MacLaine (in an Oscar-nominated early role) and Dean Martin, this drama is, in essence, Part 2 of "From Here to Eternity", with Sinatra now in the Clift role as an author/soldier returning to his small hometown, only to find himself disillusioned by its hypocracies and his label as a troublemaker and misfit (James Joyce wrote both novels, "From Here to Eternity" and its sequel, "Some Came Running"). Sinatra, MacLaine, and Martin are all excellent in this complex, lengthy (but always entertaining) film (5 out of 5 stars).

"None But the Brave" (Color; 1965) marked Sinatra's debut as a film-director; he also acts in it and does a superb job in both departments. Fans of Clint Eastwood's latest two war dramas (2006), will find much to like about this underrated WWII drama, which shows both American and Japanese viewpoints of the war. While there are a few weak spots in the acting department by some of the actors portraying American soldiers, the rest of the cast is excellent, and for its time, this was quite a daring movie for 1965 (4 out of 5 stars).

"Married On the Rocks" (Color; 1965) Also starring Deborah Kerr, Dean Martin, and Nancy Sinatra, this film is a huge disappointment. It is worth seeing at least once for the interaction of Ms. Kerr, Sinatra and Dean Martin, but the plot is abysmal and the scenes in Mexico offended Mexican nationals so much, Sinatra was banned from performing in Mexico for a short period of time(!) Why this film was included in Sinatra's "Golden Era" instead of superior comedic efforts like 1963's "Come Blow Your Horn" (written by Neil Simon) or the SUPERB 1957 Sinatra drama, "The Joker is Wild", both of which have yet to be released on DVD, is a mystery to me! (2 out of 5 stars)

Just count "Marriage on the Rocks" as a not-quite-free bonus disc, and the rest of this package is excellent film entertainment! (Overall rating for box set: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars!)

Otto Preminger's Dark Urban Poem
Before the advent of the French "New Wave," director Otto Preminger directed the highly stylized, realistic urban classic "The Man With the Golden Arm." Frank Sinatra was never consistently great as an actor, but his portrayal of heroin addict Frankie Machine is not only the best of his career, but one of the best for anybody's career, for that matter. Set in 1955, this was a pretty risky movie for its time, and was to drug addiction what Billy Wilder's 1945 "The Long Weekend" was to alcoholism: A no-holds-barred, unwhitewashed slice of reality.
Frankie's problem is that he wants to return to normalcy after being released from prison, and then a halfway house. Like the novelist says, "you write what you know," and likewise Frankie lives what he knows, and returns to his seedy Chicago neighborhood. From the moment of his uneventful return, normalcy -- his old life as a card dealer, his neurotic wife (Eleanor Parker) who feels too sorry for herself to help Frankie start clean with a new life, and a small-time heroin dealer, icily played by Darren McGavin -- tries to reel Frankie back into a dead-end routine and sink its hooks to keep him enslaved to his compulsions.

Frankie tries to embark on a new career as a jazz drummer, which provides the movie with the motifs for its streetwise "crime jazz" soundtrack, written by Elmer Bernstein. But, the cycle of addiction sets in lightning-quick because Frankie's wife wants him to bring home the money dealing cards again, which puts him smack dab in the company of the lowlifes he most desparately needs to avoid. Back at dealing, the local heroin dealer could not give a whit about Frankie staying clean; He's desparate to get Frankie to take that one fix and hook another regular customer.

Fortunately, Frankie finds salvation in the arms of Kim Novak, who was involved with Sinatra romantically at the time. Their relationship is a complex one, and Novak's empathy really comes through. Her hard-headed compassion in keeping Frankie away from a fix while he's sweating it out cold-turkey is riveting, because she's putting her own safety at risk. Even before modern theraputic terms like "in denial" were in vogue, we see Sinatra's character -- in the throes of his own addiction -- running down Novak's alcoholic boyfriend as a weakling who can't control his vices. It's beautifully handled, because the point is not to expose Frankie as a hypocrite, but to reveal his blindness to his own weaknesses. Frankie is a tragic hero of Shakesperian dimensions, but whose stage is set in a modern-day tenement.

Visually, this film is very striking, and is edited so that the montage is in rapid-fire sequence during crucial scenes. It's intercut in the same fashion as Saul Bass' pioneering title cutouts; Bass would go on to become Hollywood's most recognizable title designer, his sequences dominated by iconic graphics in movies such as Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder," "Advise and Consent" and Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and "Psycho."

Of all Preminger's movies, this is the most cinematic. He would go on to use more laid-back camera setups and editing in movies like the one named above, and would break out into less intimate and more worldly settings with epics such as "The Cardinal" and "In Harm's Way."

"The Man With the Golden Arm" catches Preminger at the top of his form as it does his cast. McGavin would never again be so intense, and only in "The Manchurian Candidate" for Sinatra and "Vertigo" for Novak would such powerful, commited and well-written performances again come their way.

Vintage Sinatra
I think The Man With The Golden Arm was his greatest role. Nice version of the movie.