BEFORE: I'm facing down a dilemma here, because I've had a documentary titled "Sinatra: Being Frank" (which got re-titled at some point to "Sinatra: To Be Frank", or perhaps the other way around...) for a couple of years now, and I wasn't able to work it in to previous incarnations of the Rock & Doc Block. I know that if I take to long to get to a film, it could scroll off Netflix or Hulu, but then if that happens, there's always iTunes, most everything is available there. So after years of trying, I finally engineered a doc chain that most certainly would allow me to watch "Being Frank", only to find that it's not available anywhere, not on any streaming service and not even on iTunes. What to do, should I just move ahead with documentaries about Dean, Jerry and Sammy and ignore the Chairman of the Board?
Good news, there's no shortage of documentaries about Sinatra - bad news, there are perhaps too many documentaries about Sinatra, how do I choose from what's available? "One More for the Road" had no cast listed on IMDB, which was a bad sign - like, I'm pretty sure Frank Sinatra's in it, but who else? But according to my notes, I'd have to watch this film on YouTube or iTunes, and that's $3.99 just to watch a film that's a little over an hour long, is it worth it? Sure, I can afford $3.99, but not for every film, I've got to start watching my movie rental budget, as I'm on forced leave from one job right now.
That's when I found "All or Nothing at All", a 2-part docuseries on Netflix, which is about to scroll off that service as of July 22. Geez, I'd better hurry, only I don't approve of this streaming blackmail-like system, where a deadline is given to me, act now, or you can't watch this film! Not cool, all films should be available at all times, I believe. But that 2-part show is a series, not a movie, right? Or is it? I watched the two-part doc about George Carlin, and that was three and a half hours long, do I want to watch a doc about Sinatra that's four hours? Well, it was directed by Alex Gibney, king of the docs ("Enron", "Going Clear", "Client 9", "The Armstrong Lie", and those docs about James Brown and Steve Jobs). But that's a double-edge sword, because Gibney has a habit of inserting himself into his films, either on camera or with voice-over, and I'm not sure I like that. I can't watch BOTH films, because I don't have that kind of time - I just figured out how many slots until Christmas, and it turns out I don't have any to spare.
Wait a sec, this hour-long one is available on Tubi for FREE (with ads) so that kind of decides it. And I can keep track of who's in it and update the IMDB credits myself, that's always fun. So that clinches it, I'll watch the short one and then move on. Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra carry over from "Dean Martin: King of Cool".
THE PLOT: Through archival performances and interviews, journey through Frank Sinatra's remarkable life, from his troubled birth in 1915 to the day The Voice was sadly silenced.
AFTER: Quick, name a Frank Sinatra song. Maybe you said "My Way", or "That's Life" - either of those songs would have been great to include in a documentary about Sinatra, they both offer some insight to his personal philosophy - only neither song is included here. There's no sign of "One for My Baby" either, which is strange because the title of the doc comes from that song, it's "one for my baby and one more for the road..." Nope, that's absent too. Look, I get it, song rights are expensive, sometimes it's the biggest cost involved in making a documentary, and you HAVE to license every song, and pay for each one twice, there's the music rights and the sync rights, the latter of which allows you to put any image you want over that song, if you don't pay that then the songwriter can potentially sue you for subverting the meaning of the song.
Not to worry, Frank recorded hundreds of songs, there's "I've Got the World on a String", "Love and Marriage", "All the Way", "It Was a Very Good Year", "Summer Wind", "Strangers in the Night", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Fly Me to the Moon" and I think maybe he once recorded a song about New York. And those are just the A-sides, what about all the album cuts? Surely any doc about Sinatra's going to be filled with tons of great music. So what do we get here? First off, "Ol' Man River" - yeah, that's not the first thing that leaps to mind when we think of Frank Sinatra. Plus I don't think you can show a white man singing that song any more, it's automatically tinged with racism now. This is followed by "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week" (with the Harry James orchestra), "Stardust" (another classic, possibly free use now), "If You Are But a Dream", "Last Night When We Were Young", "That Old Black Magic", "Too Marvelous for Words", and probably the biggest song here, "Luck Be a Lady". There's even footage of Sinatra doing a duet with Elvis, but Frank sings "Love Me Tender" and Elvis does "Witchcraft", so they switch things up a bit - which is interesting, but it's not really why we came here. The closing song here is a duet with Dean Martin, on "The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else)" - it's OK, but this is really where the filmmakers should have tried to find a duet on "One for My Baby", a song about it being late in a bar, close to closing time at a quarter to three. So many missed opportunities...
The rest of the film feels like a rushed hack job, so now I'm regretting not watching "All or Nothing at All" - four hours would have been a big time commitment, but I could have walked away from it knowing a bit more about the man, and not just the dates he married this woman or divorced that one, and what year he started hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas. I can get that information anywhere. Frank's childhood is similarly given short shrift, besides knowing that he was injured by a forceps during birth, apparently he did nothing but sing on street corners until he was 20 and formed a quartet called the Hoboken Four. What's weird is that narration of Frank's early days is spoken to footage of a train, taken from a biplane. WTF?
This man lived 82 years, and he was in showbiz for 62 of those years - there should be a lot to cover, so clearly there's a lot missing here - like how he left Capitol Records in 1960 and formed his own record label, Reprise, later bought by Warner Bros. Reprise put out records by the Kinks, and later Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Tiny Tim, John Sebastian, Frank Zappa, Emmylou Harris, Jethro Tull, T. Rex, Richard Pryor, Fleetwood Mac and our old pal Gordon Lightfoot. There's a whole documentary's worth of material there, how all that music found its way to Frank Sinatra's label, and now Eric Clapton, Green Day, Josh Groban and Michael Bublé are on that label.
Similarly, there are clips here from "From Here to Eternity", but not many - Frank had a whole second career in movies, largely ignored here. What about mentioning "The Man with the Golden Arm", "The Manchurian Candidate", "Guys and Dolls" and "Pal Joey"? Those were huge films! And why mention his perforated eardrum at birth, and not bring up the fact that it later kept him out of military service during World War II? Umm, that's kind of important - why do I have to go on Wikipedia after the film and make these connections, isn't that the filmmakers job, to sort of tie everything together? Of course Sinatra performed for the troops during World War II, doing USO tours and such, and also broadcast concerts on the Armed Forces Radio Services, that's another important thing that should have been mentioned.
This doc also made it sound like Frank just sort of started hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas during the 1960's, like just for fun. That's not the way it went down, the truth is that Sinatra had financial problems after a divorce and a slump in record sales, so he borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay his back taxes. That's when he turned to Vegas as an income source and started performing at the Desert Inn in 1951, a full decade before "One More for the Road" gets him to Vegas. Sinatra moved over to the Sands Hotel in 1953, performed several times a year, and later acquired a share in that property (much later, in 1982, he moved his act once again, over to the Golden Nugget).
The Capitol years (1953-60) were Frank's second wind, and they probably got a whole hour's worth of coverage in that OTHER documentary. Frank had quite a few comebacks and revivals over the years, even "Ocean's 11" represented a new era for his acting career, but that's not covered here, like it was in "King of Cool". And if you only mention Frank's marriages, I'm quite sure you're only telling half of the story - he had too many extramarital affairs to count, and what about all the broken engagements to Lauren Bacall, Juliet Prowse and others? Mia Farrow's seen in this doc for about five seconds, but that marriage happened, you can't just sweep it under the rug. I'm still Team Sinatra when it comes to the paternity of Ronan Farrow, just put a photo of the noted journalist side-by-side with one of a young Frank Sinatra and then tell me if you agree.
Also notably absent are any drawn connections between Sinatra and organized crime, or the kidnapping of his son, Frank Jr., or how Frank's casino hotel, the Cal Neva, lost and regained its gambling license. But perhaps this is all by design, maybe that documentary "Being Frank" stepped on somebody's toes and that's why it's no longer available anywhere. So if you're looking for a complete, thorough documentary about the life and activities of Frank Sinatra, maybe check out that four-hour one on Netflix before it goes the way of the Automat.
Oh, and here's an update on my IMDB update - I submitted credits for 34 people who appear in this film via archive footage, and about half of them have been approved, the rest are "pending". I'm not sure what method the IMDB uses to confirm that certain people appear in a film, like if it were up to me, I'd watch the film to check, but I'm crazy like that. They apparently use a robot or a computer to confirm appearances, but those things are unreliable - I like that one of the "pending" credits at the moment is for Frank Sinatra himself. So IMDB is going to investigate whether Frank Sinatra appears in the documentary about Frank Sinatra - I can't wait to see what they figure out.
Also starring the voice of Gerry Conway, with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (also carrying over from "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Joey Bishop (ditto), Montgomery Clift (ditto), Bing Crosby (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (ditto), Tom Dreesen (ditto), Ella Fitzgerald (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Peter Lawford (ditto), Elvis Presley (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Frank Sinatra Jr. (ditto), Tina Sinatra (ditto), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Milton Berle (ditto), Burt Lancaster (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Debbie Reynolds (ditto), Tony Bennett (last seen in "Jagged"), Tommy Dorsey, Mia Farrow (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Ava Gardner, Mitzi Gaynor, Julio Iglesias, Harry James, Quincy Jones (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Deborah Kerr (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Joe Mantegna (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Wayne Newton (last seen in "Class Action Park") Tom Selleck (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Barbara Marx Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Nancy Barbato Sinatra, Robert Wagner (last seen in "What Happened to Monday")
RATING: 3 out of 10 Songs for Swingin' Lovers
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