Synopsis
Oscar-winning actor, acclaimed director, and recipient of the Golden Globe Award for lifetime achievement in film, Frank Sinatra carved out one of the biggest careers in the history of Hollywood, yet his screen legacy has been overshadowed by his achievements as a recording artist. Until now. Sinatra in Hollywood offers an analytical yet deeply personal look at his screen legend.
Examining each of Sinatra’s sixty-one feature films in depth, Santopietro traces the arc of his astonishing sixty-year run as a film actor, from his rise to stardom in “boy next door” musical films through his fall from grace to the near-mythic comeback with his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity. Santopietro deals head-on with the tumultuous marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, and directly addresses the rumors of Mob involvement in Sinatra’s Hollywood career.
In Sinatra in Hollywood, the film icon receives his full due as the serious artist he was, the actor about whom director Billy Wilder emphatically stated, “Frank Sinatra is beyond talent.”
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)
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