Sinatra.

"Comes a report that Martin Scorsese might be doing a film about Frank Sinatra - and not a documentary but an honest-to-God biopic," notes Shawn Levy. "I've written a book about Sinatra, so I know that there's more than a ton of material there for a movie."

"The life and work of Frank Sinatra, who passed away 10 years ago tomorrow, will be celebrated in film, television, radio, and even a commemorative 42-cent Sinatra postage stamp, which will be issued today," notes Charlotte Cowles. Two DVD sets are out today, too, the Early Years and the Golden Years. "His film work is often remembered as an adjunct to a musician's career," writes Gary Giddins:

Updated through 5/14.

Between 1954 and 1958, though, Sinatra functioned as an actor of nerve, stature, and originality - a natural, perhaps, but also a signature personality playing the type he assiduously perfected onstage. As a quintessential antihero and derisively anti-Method actor, Sinatra - his face filled out with an appealing virility absent in his early years - embraced a work ethic that led to several ambitious movies. In these five years, alongside a couple of middlebrow melodramas, coy comedies, and a fiasco of Himalayan dimensions (The Pride and the Passion), he played an assassin in Suddenly, the best Nathan Detroit ever in Guys and Dolls, a junkie in The Man With the Golden Arm, the heir to and equal of Bing Crosby in High Society, a semi-heel in Pal Joey, and broken men in The Joker Is Wild and Some Came Running.

Also in the New York Sun, Jay Akasie reports on that stamp.

"In the 1949 musical On the Town, you'll find a lot of things that might seem familiar from other musicals - big set pieces and a whimsical, can-do attitude - but at least one or two that will seem completely foreign," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com. "Top of the list: Frank Sinatra himself playing a detail-oriented nerd of a guy more interested in seeing the sights than he is scoring with a big-city dame."

For more on Some Came Running, currently enjoying a revival in London, see David Jenkins in Time Out - and of course, albeit briefly for now, Glenn Kenny, who's heading to Cannes and has just dubbed his new blog... Some Came Running.

Update, 5/14: At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson gets an email conversation going with Sinatra's youngest daughter, Tina, regarding those new DVDs.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2008 1:53 PM