Posted on 02/16/2002 4:08:16 PM PST by Pokey78
IN Vegas, about 40 years ago, Frank Sinatra gave some broad a thousand bucks to wait naked in Dean Martin's bed. Dino came back to his room with other plans: he wanted to have a glass of milk and catch the late show before turning in, but he told the girl she was welcome to stay and watch a little television with him. After a suitable interval, he gave her two grand to go back and breathlessly recount to Frank what a fabulous lover Dean was.
That's the effect of the new Ocean's Eleven, in which George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Julia Roberts and co seem to have been paid large amounts of money to remind you how good Frank, Dino, Sammy Davis Jr, Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine were. On the face of it, that's quite an accomplishment.
The original Ocean's Eleven (1960) is, in any objective sense, a very lousy movie, a prime example, for those whose idea of cinematic improvisation is Mike Leigh, of what happens when a movie is really improvised, stumbling from take to take according to who's shown up on the set that morning. But, beyond that, why would anyone expect anything of it anyway? Acting isn't even what Frank, Dean and Sam did. They were singers, fitting in a little movie making between the nightclub act and the recreational cocktail waitresses.
Critics are agreed that the new Ocean's Eleven is a far superior film: it's the sort of thing that the original might have been if Frank and his pallies could have been bothered getting up before lunch. It's better written, better directed, better acted. But, if you did a multi-million dollar remake of Osama bin Laden's last home video, you could say exactly the same thing: the only interesting question is why, four decades on, anyone would think it worth remaking a self-indulgent, sloughed-off dud buddy caper.
The reason is simple: Rat Pack cool, a phenomenon that would have stunned Dino. Six years ago, when he bought the big casino - that's RP talk for "died" - the consensus was that Dean ended his days a pathetic, lonely anachronism - a drunk act in an age when pop stars like Carly Simon refuse to sing One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) because it encourages driving under the influence (and no doubt without a mandatory car seat for the infant).
But then something happened: hip clubs in LA scheduled "lounge" nights for twentysomethings in snap-brim hats; martinis and cigars made a comeback; the big record chains introduced a new category, "Bachelor Pad Music"; Capitol records repackaged Dino's obscurest trifles as part of their "Ultra-Lounge" series. Last year they released a Martin Christmas CD under the droll title Making Spirits Bright.
For half a decade now, Hollywood has been trying to figure out how to cash in on Rat Pack cool by putting together a new Pack, only to run into some fairly obvious problems, starting with that album title: these guys' raison d'etre was to booze it up, smoke it up, get as much hey-hey (RP for sex) as their birds (RP for penises) could handle, and spend whatever time was left over telling sex jokes, drunk jokes, race jokes and fag jokes. This one stayed in the act for 30 years:
Frank (as Dean's mixing a drink): "Dean, how do you make a fruit cordial?"
Dean: "Be nice to him."
On tour in Japan, Frank, as a mark of respect to his hosts, sang "Come Fly With Me" thus: "Come Fry With Me/ Come fry, let's fry away."
In contemporary Hollywood, everyone agrees on everything but labours under the misapprehension that he or she is daringly "transgressive": Julia Roberts dislikes Republicans, Brad Pitt likes Buddhists. Faced with guys who are genuinely transgressive, the Robertses and Pitts recoil in horror, like Mother Teresa at a lapdance club.
At the time, Frank, like Julia, disliked Republicans, but, unlike Julia, didn't feel the need to suck up to hack Democrat time-servers. Frank was a non-pliant celebrity, the guy who disdained to fit in, no matter how much they wanted him to. He sang at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, and afterwards the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, the second most powerful man in the country, went up to him and put an embracing arm round his shoulder. "Hands off the threads, creep," snarled Frank.
Consider, by way of contrast, the new Chairman of the Board, George Clooney. A nephew of Frank's pal and sometime duettist Rosemary Clooney, George has the sheen, the gloss of an old-time movie star: you can imagine him in the Cary Grant role in a Stanley Donen movie. But he's a creature of his time as much as Damon or Pitt. In December, Clooney was asked what he wanted for Christmas and replied, "I want one day when nobody is getting shot at. Call a truce for a day."
"This struck me as a child's response," wrote the National Review's Jay Nordlinger, deploring "the implied moral randomness of the actor's response: People are just shooting at each other, you know, and shooting at each other is bad." But it's the sort of thing stars are expected to say, and in that respect Clooney is more imprisoned by the constraints of the age than the old Rat Pack ever were.
It's a routine rap these days that the pallies were "racist" and "misogynist": why, even The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick dismissed them as such the other month. But Sinatra was anti-racist decades before it was cool - he made a film on "tolerance" (The House I Live In) in 1945, which is some years before Tony Blair caught on to the subject; he was the first white guy to sing a love song on television with a black woman (Lena Horne). As for "misogynist", Frank is one of the few stars none of whose women - ex-wives or casual dates - has a bad word to say about him.
I know from experience that Sinatra took people as he found them: in showbusiness, most of the people one meets are jerks, but, if you could get past that identity group, he didn't care what others you were a member of. He had fun with the black guy in the act, but only because he had a black guy in the act and nobody else did. Besides, if diversity's your bag, the new Rat Pack is rather less of a rainbow coalition than the old: for one thing, the English toff (Peter Lawford) has been dispensed with.
When Sinatra died and the networks dusted off their old footage of him and Dean on stage, tumblers in hand, wreathed in smoke, the announcers all but prefaced the clips with "Don't try this at home, boys and girls". The assumption is that Rat Pack fever is ironic and post-modern, like practically everything else these days.
It seems more likely that 21st century Rat Packers, after growing up with parents who've inflicted plonkingly earnest rockers like Sting on them for 20 years, dig these cats for real. Ditto, Clooney, Pitt and Damon. Any irony in the new Ocean's is a cover: they'd love to be able to smoke and booze like Frank and Dino, but they know, sadly, that guys will never be allowed to have that much fun again.
My favourite Sinatra movie line was in Tony Rome (1967). Sinatra, a soured Chandleresque gumshoe, has been nabbed by some punks and is coolly watching them as they pour chloroform on a dish-rag obviously intended for him. He says: "When."
And now Frank is George Clooney. And Sammy Davis is Don Cheadle. And Angie Dickinson is Julia Roberts. And Dean Martin is Brad Pitt.
When.
Though I like the Rat Pack, just for the sake of historical accuracy...
In her autobiography, "By Myself," Lauren Bacall recounts how Frank proposed to her after Bogie died, and then dropped her without a word for blabbing the news to Swifty Lazar.
She called Sinatra "a sh*t."
ROFL!
They were true to themselves, comfortable in who they were, and enjoyed life.
Contrast this to the stars of today, who are always pretending to be something they are not.
Plus Sinatra sang better than anyone.
Bump for the Chairman of the Board!
And bump you Miss Marple. I agree!
"I feel sorry for people who DON'T drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel for the rest of the day"
He loved to pound on Sammy Davis Jr..very un PC, to wit:
" The management of this hotel spares no expense. They brought Sammy Davis Jr in just to clean..."
"Sammy wrote a book called 'Yes I Can. ' I read it, and sent him a telegram that said, 'No, You Can't! ' "
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Mark Steyn probably noticed that when Carly redid Lili Marlene she changed the second verse where the original said:
"Orders came for sailing
Somewhere over there!
'All confined to barracks'
Was more than I could bear . . .
Too thugishly warlike, no doubt.
I mean the original English translation from the truly original German.
George Clooney? Brad Pitt? Julia Roberts?
Comparing these no-talent Hollywood airheads to Deano, Sammy, and Frank? Please! Throw pearls to swine if you wish, but not here on FR!
Besides, we already found a successor to the Rat Pack....
The Kings and Queen of Cool.
Accept no Hollywood substitutes. No Clydes need apply....
Be Seeing You,
Chris
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