I recently finished reading James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice, a wonderful new biography of Frank Sinatra from his birth in 1915 through 1954, when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity. What impressed me most about the book—besides the account of Sinatra’s volcanic love affair with Ava Gardner (be still, my heart!)—was Kaplan’s detailing of the horrendous career slump that took the singer, in less than a decade, from being our first teen idol (a precursor to Elvis and the Beatles) to a showbiz laughingstock. The slump was broken, of course, when Sinatra landed the role of Maggio in Eternity—a role that was made for him (“an overaggressive, loud-talking bantamweight who snarls to hide his terror”). He won the role, Kaplan tells us, not so much through his Mob connections (there was no horse’s head in the bed of a studio exec, as in The Godfather) but through the intervention of Gardner.
Frankie caught a tremendous break in getting the role of Maggio, to be sure, but it might not have turned out nearly as well if the movie hadn’t been such a success. Thankfully, director Fred Zinneman knew exactly how to translate James Jones’ sprawling, brilliant, but wildly overwritten novel into a perfectly trimmed down portrait of career soldiers in the period just before and immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Reading Frank inevitably drove me back to both the novel and the movie. It’s hardly surprising that Thomas Wolfe was one of Jones’ heroes because Jones’ prose, like Wolfe’s, is a frustrating mix of eloquence and rhetorical bombast. He has great difficulty keeping himself out of his characters’ dialogue, and he often belabors an idea as if it were an army boot that needed spit-shining. And yet his story, contrasting two kinds of rugged individualists, engages us with the power of myth.
On the one hand, Jones gives us two variations on the hard-headed and ultimately self-destructive individualist: Maggio, snarling, like the real-life Frank, to hide his terror, and Robert E. Lee Prewitt, perfectly portrayed in the movie by Montgomery Clift, the good soldier as idealist, refusing to knuckle under to those who would compromise his integrity. On the other hand, we have Milt Warden (also perfectly cast as Burt Lancaster), the equally rugged but wily company sergeant, Tom Sawyer to Maggio’s and Prewitt’s Huck Finn, manipulating rather than defying the opposition. In the army, Jones tells us, the defiant individual is crushed, while his shrewd counterpart survives, diminished but alive. Without both halves of that equation, Eternity would have been just another hymn to futile gestures, or just another celebration of organization men.
Yes, Frankie caught a break, but it wasn’t just the role, good as it was. It helped that the book behind the role had buried within its verbiage the power to grab us by the archetypal heartstrings. And, beyond that, Frankie’s break was working for a director who managed to do something that so rarely happens: make a movie that is better than the book.
