Time for a massive Frank Sinatra small screen sit-in. You bring the popcorn.
A series of separately available releases chronicle the small screen history of Ol’ Blue Eyes from the ’50s onwards. By Andrew Male.
The Frank Sinatra Collection EAGLE ROCK ENTERTAINMENT. DVD
Sinatra’s first TV shows were a disaster. An early-’50s CBS series was killed off during the controversy surrounding his affair with Ava Gardner. His late-’50s ABC effort suffered death-by-critics due to Sinatra’s refusal to rehearse. So, when Frank agreed to a 1965 NBC TV special, things looked bad, especially with the singer exhausted from battling reporters over his relationship with Mia Farrow, and laid low by a foul cold, as referenced in Gay Talese’s now famous 1966 Esquire profile. Yet somehow the finished programme was incredible. Amid a minimalist set of mustard yellow light and grey metal diagonals, looking like a tweedy anachronism, and dwarfed by Nelson Riddle’s 43-piece orchestra, Sinatra sang with weary warmth and troubled depth, revisiting songs of his youth and thoroughly inhabiting modern numbers of melancholy and loss. The performance was central to the singer’s reinvention during the 1960s, a proto Elvis 68 Special, and alongside 1966’s Part II forms A Man And His Music the first of Eagle Vision’s DVDs cataloguing Sinatra’s small screen history. Judging from Happy Holidays With Frank & Bing/Vintage Sinatra which features ’50s series highlights alongside a 1957 festive confection where Sinatra and Bing Crosby sing carols of Merrie England, ’50s Sinatra was already a masterful visual interpreter of his songs (especially on a theatrical 1958 noir reading of One For My Baby), and it’s this that subsequent ’60s shows A Man And His Music + Ella + Jobim/Francis Albert Sinatra Does His Thing/Sinatra excel in. From its dripping taps and road drills montage to Sinatra jazzily cutting loose with Riddle and gang, 1967’s Ella + Jobim repeatedly delights, Frank swapping pop hits with a breezy Fitzgerald, and gently whispering bossa poetry over Jobim’s sad guitar. On …Does His Thing, Sinatra addresses civil rights in a spirituals medley with Diahann Carroll, croons heartbreak in a cheap motel set, and grooves awkwardly in Nehru jacket with The 5th Dimension. 1969’s Sinatra is mostly a sluggish mess, Frank bored, Don Costa’s orchestra a drag, but the ‘A Man Alone’ sequence is something else, Sinatra in itchy Arran sweater, delivering Rod McKuen’s wistful songs of uncertain gender with power, sensitivity and grace. Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back/The Main Event documents Sinatra’s postretirement comeback. The rusty, nervous Frank of 1973’s Ol’ Blue Eyes kills it with poignant saloon songs, while The Main Event, Frank’s televised 1974 Madison Square Garden super-gig, buzzes with uptown energy. At The Royal Festival Hall/Sinatra In Japan features the 1970 London RFH Frank, freewheeling and forgetting lines with a stunning Billy Miller Orchestra, and the suave 1985 Budokan show, somewhat tainted by the singer’s sour humour. Meanwhile, Concert For The Americas is just the Dominican Republic’s Altos de Chavón concert from August 1982, croaky Sinatra and the Buddy Rich Orchestra in fiery form. Finally, with Sinatra And Friends/ The Man And His Music the 1977 …And Friends bash suffers from variety show guests such as John Denver and Robert Merrill, but the 1981 performance stuns, thanks to a truly imperial Count Basie And His Orchestra and two desolate numbers from the late-career masterpiece She Shot Me Down that burn with same dramatic intensity Sinatra exhibited during that 1958 performance of One For My Baby, 23 years earlier.
“THE 1974 MADISON SQUARE GARDEN SUPER-GIG
BUZZES WITH UPTOWN ENERGY.”