Features:
Description:
A cheapjack "tribute" to Frank Sinatra, this disc consists of two 45-minute programs, both stuffed with seemingly random clips. The Hollywood Years has a clueless narrator presenting an incoherent, out-of-order account of Sinatra's movie career. Much of it is made up of coming-attractions trailers (a public-domain staple in low-rent TV "biographies"), which might be kind of fun ("Sinatra Meets Lollobridgida, and the Screen Catches Fire!") if they weren't so mercilessly chopped up. The rest is hodgepodge, including parts of Sinatra's Oscar-winning 1945 short film about tolerance, The House I Live In, although even this interesting social landmark is presented without introduction or identification. There's a "making-of" documentary from the set of 1968's The Detective, and a conversation with John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod, director and screenwriter of The Manchurian Candidate, respectively. But basically The Hollywood Years resembles a bunch of stuff found in a box in somebody's basement, assembled in haphazard order. On Television is marginally more interesting, with rare clips from Sinatra's own late-'50s TV series, including a dramatic sketch that suggests why the series was short-lived. The high points are two sequences from The Tonight Show, one with Johnny Carson (who asks Sinatra, "When you're in a romantic mood, whose records do you put on?"), one with Sinatra as guest host. Elsewhere, Frank is seen talking (from cue cards) with Eleanor Roosevelt, and hosting the return of Elvis Presley from the Army--an index of the collision of cultures that happened at the end of the Eisenhower years. There's also a great ad for Chesterfield cigarettes, which suggest how lame this collection is. --Robert Horton
| 
