Some Came Running is a Hollywood masterpiece that danced on the edges of my radar for a long time. While I loved Vincent Minnelli’s musicals since I became enamored at 18 with Jacques Demy’s riffing on them, his melodramas escaped me until recently. I finally pulled the trigger on watching this 1958 adaptation of James Jones novel—random recommendations, seeing the odd Twitter screenshot, coincidences, and, most of all, my obsession with Indiana.
The film opens with a Greyhound pulling into Parkland (shot in Madison, just over the Ohio River from Kentucky). An Army veteran, Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra), disembarks to find that a woman apparently hopped on with him the night before in Chicago. Ginny, played by the indomitable Shirley MacLaine, is one of the great characters of American fiction—she’s unflappable, but real, built on a drive forward that she can’t describe or reason, and yet all the bitter people around her (including Dave) thinks she’s just a tramp. Dave and Ginny initially part ways while he goes and tries to reconnect with his brother, Frank (Arthur Kennedy), who built a name for himself in town and doesn’t want much to do with his washed-up, alcoholic writer brother.
Everyone in Parkland, it seems, has got a problem. From the high-ups with loveless, failing marriages like Frank, down to the interloping gamblers like Dean Martin’s character Dillert, who has a fixation on keeping his cowboy hat on all the time and keeps Dave on the sauce. In Parkland, everyone is a two-bit, no-good hustler, whether you sit on the board of the bank and run a well-to-do jewelry store or make a living beating suckers at cards. That’s everyone except for Ginny and Gwen French (Martha Hyer), a schoolteacher and fan of Dave's work, whom Dave falls in love with.
Dave and Gwen’s romance is impossible, though. While she loves it on the page, Dave’s passion is harsher on her Midwestern sensibilities in person. He’s a firestorm: Dave will burn down his own life and everyone else in the house with it. Although she feels something for him, she can’t tell if any of it has to do with the way he feels about her, or if it’s just the way that he makes her feel about him. There’s an irony to it as the viewer, in that we get to spend time in Dave’s secret, underworld life to get to know that he does love Gwen but there’s no possibility of her accepting him for who he really is, what he really does. She’s a schoolteacher, after all, and he’s a writer, both a doom he’s created for himself and an outlet for which to express it.
Ginny has the opposite problem: she knows that Dave doesn’t love her, but she’s head over heels for him. She tragically resigns herself to this fact, and yet keeps going, hoping to one day live a lie good enough that it feels real. She’s a character that I’m not sure could’ve been played by anyone besides Shirley MacLaine. While Sinatra gives a career standout performance where he wears his face so raggedly that Arthur Kennedy looks like the conventionally attractive one by comparison, MacLaine is on a level that the likes of Stanwyck and Lupino only manages to reach once or twice. It’s the way MacLaine holds her stuffed animal purse or reacts to a little look from Sinatra, it’s the room Minnelli gives them to do so—there’s some sort of magic there where you stop seeing actors or characters, and you start seeing something eternal, like James Dean becoming James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
There’s a sequence at their regular downtown bar, Smitty’s, where Ginny is pecking at a burger over conversation. The rest of the bar seems to be drinking till they drop, and she’s having a burger. MacLaine takes deliberate bites while Sinatra is trying to charm. There’s a piece of iceberg lettuce hanging out of the back, she notices it and flips the burger around to bite it off. She lets the conversation take over from there, ultimately leaving the rest of the sandwich behind to go with the party and be with Dave for the night. The next morning Dave finds a fur on the floor, which Dillert assures him is an old trick played by women so they have an excuse to come back. Sure enough, Ginny comes running back in.
