A Real Swinger of a Nightmare: Frank Sinatra and the Grim Side of the WWII Veteran’s Story

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

My sincere thanks to Daniel Glenn and Jonathan Sircy for their comments and invaluable feedback on this essay.

Notes

1 Kaplan, Frank: The Voice, p. 186, p. 206.

2 Ibid., p. 187.

3 Rojek, Frank Sinatra, p. 24.

4 In the WWII and Korean War era, the terms combat fatigue or battle fatigue were often used to describe the condition we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although a number of other terms were used as well. PTSD did not enter the lexicon until after the Vietnam War, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (DSM-III) in 1980. In this article, I most often use post-traumatic stress because this accurately captures how we would read the symptoms today.

5 Quoted by Kaplan, Frank, p. 206.

6 Gilbert, “The Swinger and the Loser: Sinatra, Masculinity, and Fifties Culture,” in Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture, p. 39.

7 McLean, “What a Swell Party This Was,” in Larger than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s, p. 242.

8 For more on Sinatra’s legacy, see Roberta Pearson, “Remembering Frank Sinatra: Celebrity Studies Meets Memory Studies,” in Real Lives: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Media. See also The Frank Sinatra Reader, edited by Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza).

9 For an in-depth exploration of how Sinatra challenged social, ethnic, and gender norms of the 1950s, see Karen McNally When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity.

10 Sripada, Pfeiffer, Rauch, and Bohnert, “Social Support and Mental Health Treatment Among Persons With PTSD: Results of a Nationally Representative Survey,” in Psychiatry Online.

11 Rojek, Frank, pp. 1–11.

12 Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, p. 91.

13 McLean, “Swell Party,” p. 24.

14 Wayne, “Frank Sinatra,” The Leading Men of MGM, pp. 331–347.

15 Ibid., p. 342.

16 He won the part, due to his impressive screen test, availability, and willingness to work for the small sum of 8000 dollars; however, various rumors abound about potential back dealings. Eli Wallach had initially been the favored candidate for the role but had to turn it down due to a commitment on Broadway (McNally, When Frankie, p. 59). Ava Gardner is also said to have had played a part in his getting the role (Santopietro, Sinatra in Hollywood, pp. 132–4).

17 McNally, When Frankie, p. 59.

18 Santopietro, Sinatra Hollywood, p. 134.

19 McNally, When Frankie, p. 61–65.

20 Ibid., p. 63.

21 Ibid., p. 64.

22 In Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties, Steven Cohan identifies male stars of the 1950s whose images masqueraded as normative masculinity but that actually, upon inspection, indicate the instability of white male American masculinity in the postwar era. I argue that Sinatra’s image functions in a similar way, only perhaps less disguised and more raw than the actors Cohan discusses.

23 Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in The Best Years of Our Lives,” in American Quarterly, pp. 545–547. See also Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home.

24 The term Section 8 refers to a category of discharge from the United States military for reason of being mentally unfit for service.

25 While WWII represented a more advanced and compassionate understanding and treatment of battle stress, it was, nonetheless, often the case that soldiers who complained of psychological problems were sometimes ridiculed or ignored altogether (Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry, p. 96).

26 See, for example, “Mama’s Boys.” For more on the legacy of intersection of class issues and war trauma, see Elaine Showalter, “Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock,” in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980.

27 For support for this claim, see “Neurotic Heroes.”

28 “Young at Heart,” TCM.com, http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/194259%7C0/Young-At-Heart.html

29 McNally reads Sinatra’s image in this film as evidencing an alternative masculinity that resists emasculation, but I see it as particularly emasculated (When Frankie, pp. 28–36).

30 Comparing Sinatra’s performance of masculinity to that of a female diva who hyper-performs her femininity, Roger Gilbert points out the tenuous grip the actor held on his macho image: “Sinatra was willing to strip away the protective covering of poise and charm that had always characterized the star in order to expose the wounded ego beneath” (Swinger and Loser, p. 42).

31 McNally, When Frankie, pp. 34—35.

32 See, for example, Van de Water, “Soldiers Wounded in Mind,” in Science News Letter; Furnas, “Meet Ed Savickas,” in Ladies Home Journal; Hohman, “Combat Fatigue,” in Ladies Home Journal.

33 The sense of happenstance is unsettling and pervasive throughout the film and perhaps resembles the kind of random casualties that occur in battle.

34 Berg, “The Manchurian Candidate: Compromised Agency and Uncertain Casualty, in A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film,” p. 29.

35 R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance observe, “In that stunning and justly famous circular shot of The Manchurian Candidate, we learn not only some of the general effects of the brainwashing hallucination but in fact penetrate to the actual process of mentality on the characters, sharing their confusion and oneiric withdrawal” (Palmer and Pomerance, “Introduction: Why Don’t You Pass the Time by Playing a Little Solitaire?” in A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film, p. 8).

36 “Shocking Military Suicide Rates and Identifying the Signs,” in U.S. Veterans Magazine.

37 The exceptions to this rule are Young at Heart, which features an artificially “tacked-on” happy conclusion after Sinatra’s near-suicide, and Suddenly, which ends with the killing of Sinatra’s character.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colleen Glenn

Colleen Glenn is an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston, where she teaches courses in film studies and writing. Glenn’s research interests include star studies, masculinity studies, and Hollywood film history. With Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Glenn edited a collection of essays on movie stars entitled Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering (Wayne State UP, 2015). Glenn has published articles on Woody Allen, Mickey Rourke, and Jimmy Stewart as well as numerous film reviews. Glenn is currently working on a monograph on Jimmy Stewart and his post-WWII films and their relationship to war trauma.