Frank Sinatra was best as tough men with something wrong underneath, played fast and on instinct, and the 1950s gave him several. In Ocean's Eleven he plays a man nothing can surprise and looks like a man nothing can interest.
Fi1m perspective
In Ocean's Eleven (1960) Frank Sinatra spends much of the film in an orange mohair jumper, looking as if he is between sets. He plays Danny Ocean as a man nothing can surprise, and the effect is of a man nothing can interest. Dean Martin gets away with the same half-asleep manner because Sam Harmon is written as a sceptic who thinks the whole plan is a bad idea; Danny is supposed to want it. We kept waiting for him to want something, anything, and after an hour we gave up and started watching Richard Conte instead, who plays an electrician with a bad heart and seems to have read the script.
Sinatra was a singer first, famous with Tommy Dorsey and then on his own from the mid-1930s, and the films of the 1940s used him as a light presence beside Gene Kelly, most happily in On the Town (1949). By the early 1950s the film work had stalled. What brought it back was a supporting part, Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953), and it set the pattern for the decade that followed: tough men with something wrong underneath, Frankie Machine in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Bennett Marco in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Those are the parts the reputation rests on, and they are the ones to see.
The method, such as it was, was to do it once. He did not care to rehearse and did not like second takes, and on a damaged man that instinct reads as nerve: the cocky exterior is thin because he has not had time to thicken it, and what shows through looks like fear. On a man who is meant to be in charge there is nothing underneath to show, and one take of nothing is still nothing. The Rat Pack pictures with Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. were built on the second kind of part, and the ease the group sold in nightclubs does not survive the trip into a screenplay. On screen it looks like men waiting for their cue.
He worked less from the late 1970s and died in 1998. If you are coming to him fresh, start with the damaged men of the 1950s and early 1960s, and save the heist for a night when you want the Strip in wide screen and Nelson Riddle's brass and do not much mind who is standing in front of them. Danny Ocean will be there, in his jumper, waiting for the show to end.
Biography
Frank Sinatra, also credited as Francis Albert Sinatra, was an American singer and actor. He played Danny Ocean in the heist film Ocean's Eleven (1960).
Sinatra was born on 12 December 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and died on 14 May 1998. He received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity (1953). His other film roles include Guys and Dolls (1955), High Society (1956) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He was a member of the Rat Pack and appeared alongside Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop in several films.
