by Victor Pryor
If nothing else, watching the two films in the Tony Rome franchise back-to-back provides one very interesting revelation: in his day, Frank Sinatra was basically a less ambitious Adam Sandler.
It’s a conclusion that’s impossible to deny once it occurs to you; like Sandler, Frank Sinatra was a good actor who squandered his talents on lazy vehicles that were little more than an excuse to pal around with his assorted pals and flunkies. But, to Sandler’s credit (erm… loosely speaking), he was somehow able to get studios to bankroll his vacations to everywhere from Puerto Rico to Africa, while Ol’ Blue Eyes doesn’t make it any farther than Miami.
Yes, scenic Miami is the setting for Frank Sinatra’s bid at franchise stardom, which thanks to the fine folks at Twilight Time, has finally been captured on Blu-ray as the Tony Rome Collection (which, equaling precisely two, seem less like a collection and more like a ‘Couple O’ Flicks’).
Based on a series of novels by Marvin Albert, Tony Rome is an old school detective in an era where that sort of thing is old hat. He’s got all the old vices (his bookie calls the police station more often than he does Rome’s own place) and a knack for getting hit on by women that are at least 20 years too young for him.
As one does.
In a post James Bond world, this was definitively a trend. There were, of course, the Derek Flint films; fellow Rat Packer Dean Martin and his delightfully inept ‘Matt Helm’ adaptations (and just where is that Blu-ray box set, Twilight Time?).
Also, the little mentioned and little loved attempt by Sammy Davis Jr. to get in on the action, Codename: The Candy Man… but there’s a 50/50 chance I’m making that up.
Wisely, Sinatra played to his strengths, eschewing the spy game for the more down to Earth grit of the detective story genre. And though his ambivalence towards acting was the stuff of legend, he had more than enough onscreen charisma to paper over the thin (yet bloated) scripts he seemed to prefer at this late stage in the game.
Which is a very good thing, because as detective movies, the Tony Rome films fall more than a little flat.
If nothing else, Tony Rome may very well hold the distinct honor of launching the cliche of the low rent private eye that lives on a houseboat. This was a formative aspect of my understanding of the genre: all the coolest crime solvers live on houseboats and drive rusted out beaters (in this case a 1961 Ford Galaxie Sunliner). It’s a kick to see these standbys in their most nascent form.
The titular Rome is a private dick with the barest hint of a backstory (his father was a cop who committed suicide… not that the story does anything with it), who gets hired by his ex-partner to “handle” a drunk girl passed out in a fleabag hotel room (Sue Lyon, former Lolita, as Diana Pines). Tony stealthily drops her off at her parents, who turn out to be very, very wealthy. Things get complicated from there on out.
Unfortunately after the first twenty or so minutes, which are quite fun and sketch a sunnily scurvy world to wallow around in, all the energy dissipates. The actual story, some hugger mugger about a missing diamond stick pin, fails to transcend the banality of its thru-line, lacking the pleasing convolution of the best detective stories. Really, when the truth is revealed, it turns out to be in an endless web of banal exposition, along the lines of your average police procedural. It’s the sort of thing Mannix would have resolved in forty minutes (give or take a few commercial breaks), stretched out to nearly two mind-numbing hours.
But at the axis of it all is Sinatra, buoying the movie with his big screen charisma, pretty much the only thing keeping the film from being utterly inert. Even pushing past 50, he’s still game for the odd fistfight, chase scene, or pratfall. And he delivers his wisecracks with the air of a studied professional.
Past Frankie, the cast is way more of a mixed bag. Oftentimes in detective stories, the oddball side characters steal the show. Being a suspect in a detective story is a license to ham it up, and the most memorable scenes tend to come from those moments when a character actor gets let off the leash with impunity.
Nobody here is really operating on that level. Even the usually redoubtable Richard Conte isn’t able to get much out of his role as the de rigeur homicide Lieutenant frenemy. It seems like Frank’s ‘one-take and out’ approach to performance left a lot of the actors stranded. Even Gena Rowlands, stuck in the thankless part of Diana’s stepmother, doesn’t manage anything other than ‘passable’.
Though it has to be said, Jill St. John as the first in what was presumably intended to be a long line of ‘Rome Girls’, does the best she can with her eye candy role. As the oft-married femme fatale Ann Archer(!), St. John does a yeoman’s job of seeming attracted to the aging Chairman, even when he wears that silly ass sailor’s hat, which should entitle her to some kind of booby prize.
Come on, just look at that stupid thing…
The previous sentence is clearly the setup for a joke so bad, that even the movie refuses to go there. Which is saying something.
Tony Rome starts strong, but winds up wheezing to the finish line. But it’s not without its charms… where else are you going to find Nancy Sinatra singing a theme song that basically warns women everywhere to constantly be on their guard, because her father is DTF at all times?
(I’m hoping the answer is ‘nowhere else’, but I’m suddenly very terrified that it isn’t…)
While it’s still something short of a lost classic, Lady In Cement improves on Tony Rome in just about every way: a better, more interesting mystery, more entertaining side characters, and (crucially) a drastically reduced runtime. The jump in quality may be due to the fact that Albert took control of the franchise, actually adapting his own novel for the big screen.
Or it could be the boobs. It’s entirely possible I’m overthinking things.
This time, Rome and his vice squad buddy Rudy uncover a naked corpse at the bottom of the sea while searching for sunken treasure (as one does). The identity of the corpse, as well as the reasons for its disposal, form the basis of the plot.
Frank is still as amusing as ever, but this time he doesn’t have to carry the entire movie on his back. A full gallery of oddballs pick up the slack in moving the story along, none more entertaining than Dan Blocker as Waldo Gronsky.
The 6’4″, 300- lb. Blocker, a household name at the time due to his work as Hoss in Bonanza (which gets a jokey shout-out at one point, meaning that cheap meta-gags aren’t just a modern invention), steals the movie out from under Sinatra as a hulking crook whose innate likability doesn’t make him any less dangerous, to others or himself.
Then again, I may be the wrong guy for this job; after all, who in their right mind extols the virtues of Dan Blocker when right over there in the green bikini is Raquel Welch.
Yes, Raquel Welch! Unarguably one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen.
And, arguably, also an actress.
As an alcoholic socialite with mysterious motives, Welch is burdened with her opening line being a rape joke that even for a movie like this doesn’t make any fucking sense. It’s hard to recover from that, so I suppose it’s just as well she doesn’t seem to try.
But then again, she is breathtakingly beautiful, and let’s not even pretend that wasn’t the point of hiring her in the first place.
That, and apparently to see how high the on-set stylists could make her hair go.
Good for them; They made it go all the way up!
There’s a lot to like about Lady In Cement, from the small cameo by Lainie Kazan at her absolute brassiest, to the endearingly old school car chase, which is really more like a ‘medium speed car follow’.
But, as with many movies of the period, especially those skewing ‘hep’ and ‘modern’, there’s a lot to SYH at, too. Both movies have a weird thing about gays; not exactly homophobic, but… highly questionable in its sense of progressivism (which, come to think of it, has also been a staple of Adam Sandler movies, give or take a Chuck and Larry…)
There’s a scene in Tony Rome where a pair of coded lesbians stop the movie cold to have an embarrassingly overwrought domestic dispute, which is more than a little unpleasant. Less grotty, but just as questionable, is Frank Raiter, who gives a modishly amusing performance in the role of go-go club owner Danny Yale… who is a flamboyant stereotype of a character. None of it is as offensive as it could have been; there’s no derision here. However, there’s definitely a sense of exploitation, and not so much in the good way…
Both films are directed by Gordon Douglas, whose work pretty much stands as the definition of the term “journeyman”. His work is competent, but never rises above period appropriate Prime Time TV level. His only innovation, really, is the incessant zooming in on the butts of women wearing tight pants. Which, even for the era, is a little over the top.
Despite the still potent magnetism of latter day Frank Sinatra, the Tony Rome series never escapes feeling like a slightly sleazed up version of your average ’60s era cop show. There’s some kitschy charm in the retro antics, which might make it worth viewing, but on the Rat Pack scale, it’s certainly no ‘Matt Helm’.
Sorry, Frankie…
Ehhh, he’ll be fine…
SPECIAL FEATURES
Speacial features include an isolated film score (viva Hugo Montenegro!!!), an audio commentary with multiple film historians including Anthony Latino and Eddie Friedfeld, and trailers.
