‘Some Came Running’ or — Cinemascope Squalor?
WW II vet and struggling novelist Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) is deposited on a Greyhound bus and transported back to his hometown of Parkman, Indiana, and I must draw your attention to the word “deposited” because Dave is a man who’s seemingly relinquished any and all forms of internal impetus, propulsion or motivation.
Back in town Dave immediately sets about doing… nothing? So what does Dave want? Is it money? No, because he’s got plenty to the point it’s practically meaningless. Sex? He appears to have shagged himself spent in Chicago. Literary success? He’s given up writing that book, the first draft of which he’s still carrying around, although is this down to trauma induced writer’s block or has he simply thrown in the towel? Or maybe he’s searching for an ending that’s beyond his ability to grasp?
In Parkman Dave meets another “parked man”, Bama Dillert (an excellent Dean Martin), with whom he shares a passion, although this isn’t so much the endless smoking, drinking and gambling (Dave admits if he wins it’s luck, not skill, so even here there’s the absence of wilful application) but the belief that life might not be worth the effort.
Dave is finally stirred when he meets, and falls for, Gwen French (Martha Hyer), a creative writing teacher and fan of Dave’s novels (she’s easily allured to fiction but has difficulty with the grubby truth of the “real”), although is Dave’s attraction to Gwen genuine or because she represents the world of “respectable society”, a realm she might be able to lift Dave up into even if we know he’ll be the one dragging her down?
Besides, Dave’s more suited to Ginny (Shirley MacLaine), the “hostess” he picked up, or, more accurately, grudgingly allowed to become attached to, in Chicago. Yet even here there’s a mismatch between the two as she has a warm, whacked-out haze about her while he’s as cold as a splinter of flint. “I love you,” she tells him, “but I don’t understand you. Now what’s the matter with that?”
So Gwen was right when she told Dave he’d already written the perfect ending to his novel where the woman walks out, it’s just Dave doesn’t see it that way because he’s still functioning under the adolescent assumption of “getting the girl” whilst Gwen knows a woman is frequently best running away as fast as she can. And she’s right, because Dave is deeply unlikeable and treats Gwen like an object.
Then again, in Parkman you’re either a socialised human being (flawed, hypocritical, your respectability a facade) or an inanimate figurine like Bama’s squeeze (a drugged-out, comatose mannequin) and even when affection is displayed its one-sided, unrequited nature results in the recipient becoming stiff and unresponsive before pulling away like a resentful corpse (notice near the end how Dave flinches from what might the only loving kiss he’ll receive in his life).
It takes the failure of another man to rouse Dave into action and only then it’s because he doesn’t want his niece sinking down to his level as Dave is acutely aware of how easy it is to fall through the cracks in life and how almost impossible it is to crawl your way back up.
Meanwhile, director Vincente Minnelli is acutely aware that melodrama requires ironic juxtapositions to make the material work, a fantastic example being when Gwen takes Dave out into her father’s garden, an idyllic paradise of lush verdant beauty. It’s unspeakably perfect… if it wasn’t for the monstrously dirty factory comedically belching pollution into the skies behind them.
Yet the most skin-crawling moment comes after the film’s most sexually charged (and equally skin-crawling) scene where Dave has successfully “seduced” Gwen by lustfully exerting his “masculinity”. We then cut to his brother, Frank (an incredible Arthur Kennedy), attempting the same tactic on his wife and failing spectacularly. It would be hilarious if he didn’t immediately leave and take his “dull, small, greedy” frustrations out on his secretary.
Fortunately Bama is around to remind us not all men are bastards and in one of the film’s few touches of tenderness he and the nun nursing him in hospital coquettishly flirt with each other via their exaggerated headgear.
When the film climaxes it does so with a series of shots at the town’s fair that are so astounding, so technically audacious, so immaculately composed and controlled they’d make Orson Welles and Brian De Palma green with envy.
If, like myself, you’re only familiar with Vincente Minnelli’s dazzling musicals then check out ‘Some Came Running’ (1958) because when it comes to handling melodrama then, from this evidence, he might’ve been even better.