Rent Some Came Running (1958)

Shirley MacLaine steals the show - Some Came Running review by CW

Dated and flat until Shirley MacLaine is in a scene. She definitely makes it worth watching. She is absolutely lovely and nails her role as a somewhat simple sexy woman who is crazy mad in love with the character played by Frank Sinatra. She won the Academy Award for her part.

Running on Star Power - Some Came Running review by griggs

Some Came Running is a Minnelli melodrama held together by three performances and not much else. Without its leads, this could easily have been a soap opera with better lighting. The story is all familiar furniture: army vet comes home, respectable brother turns out to be a fraud, party girl loves too hard. Still, Minnelli moves the camera like he’s staging a dance, and the carnival finale alone is worth the trip.

What gives it some force is the way it cuts into small-town hypocrisy and class snobbery. The supposedly respectable people — Frank, Agnes, Gwen — are the ones most trapped by status, appearances and self-interest, while the outcasts come off as the only people with any real decency. Sinatra is good, Martin is weirdly better, but MacLaine runs away with the whole thing. Ginny is loud, gaudy, completely undignified, and still the most decent person in town by a mile.

That is what makes the ending sting. Dave only really sees Ginny’s worth when it is far too late, which gives her death its punch even if the melodrama sags elsewhere. Worth seeing once. Watching it again? Only if it turned up on telly and I couldn’t find the remote.

Colourful Melodrama (spoiler). - Some Came Running review by Steve

This is set in the midwest but employs all the archetypes of '50s southern melodrama: the nonconformist who drifts back to his old hometown; the beautiful/frozen female intellectual; the floozy; the weak and shifty brother who stayed behind to pocket the filthy lucre; and the aristocratic relics of old money. 

Frank Sinatra is the alcoholic soldier who returns home after WWII, with Shirley MacLaine's dim bulb nightclub 'hostess' in tow. He develops a close relationship with an outwardly charismatic/inwardly repulsive poker shark (Dean Martin) and aspires to an inhibited, censorious schoolteacher (Martha Hyer). But he is repelled by the near limitless hypocrisy.

The drifter ultimately settles for the unconditional love of the moll, which leads to tragedy. This is Sinatra's best performance, as a morally ambiguous anti-hero, disgusted by small town sanctimony. But it's MacLaine's film, and she's a heartbreaker as the abused, exploitable girl who seems to have no personality other than the prodigious intensity of her feelings.

 The film is intelligently directed by Minnelli with long camera edits which allow the actors to develop each scene. The mood gets progressively darker until eventually quite like film noir, but in luscious colour. The climax, with the stunning, impressionist kaleidoscope of lights, scored by Elmer Bernstein's piano led jazz big band, is an absolute knockout.