‘Some Came Running’ is a drama, time capsule

 

I took a trip back into the 1950s of my hometown, Madison, Indiana, last night. As it has before, it brought back some wonderful memories.

No, Old Corporal doesn’t have his own time machine; wish I did. I went, with a friend, to see the film “Some Came Running,” filmed here in 1958. It’s an old movie; any younger people reading this may have never heard of it. Starred Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, and others. “Some Came Running” was based on a novel by James Jones, who had written “From Here to Eternity,” the movie version of which had earned Sinatra an Academy Award four years before. Jones was an Illinoisian who had served in World War II, and who used his wartime experiences as a basis for “Eternity.” His novel “Some Came Running” was more autobiographical, taking place in Parkman, Indiana, a/k/a Madison, on the banks of the Ohio River.

Dave Hirsh (Sinatra), who recently got out of the Army, and is a published, though now frustrated and inactive, writer, returns to Parkman, his hometown, mostly because he got roaring drunk after winning $5,500 in a poker game and was put on the bus to Parkman by his buddies. He awakes, dazed and confused, as the bus rolls into town, down a Main Street that even younger Madisonians, or transplants, will still recognize as ours. From our vantage point inside the bus we see the old Jefferson County Jail, which had been condemned in the later years of the 19th Century but was still in use; the elderly gents who often sat, lined up on the rock wall between the sidewalk and the jail, swapping lies and pocket knives; the courthouse next door, looking not much different than it does today; Goodman & Jester Department store, just across Jefferson Street; John Knoebel & Son Clothing, which closed just in the past few years; and right next to it, Harper’s Rexall Drug Store.

A 13-year-old boy often went into that store to leaf through the detective magazines and Playboys displayed near the front windows of the place. He was in there that day, and was watching through the windows when the bus came down Main, headed west, preceded by a camera car. A woman who worked in the store stood beside him, also taking in the passing scene, so unique and fascinating in this small river town.

I was that boy. As we stared out the window, the bus passed and the camera which was mounted inside the bus picked up our faces.

How do I know that? Oh, you won’t see us in the finished movie. But I’m sure we appeared on the negatives, because just as we get to a point when the woman and boy would be visible, the director cuts to a different shot and they miss their two seconds of fame.

Dave Hirsh isn’t alone on the bus. A girl he had had a fling with in Chicago, Ginny Moorhead (MacLaine), is also a passenger, and she gets out right after the groggy Hirsh, all cheerful and sure that they’ve started a beautiful relationship. Hirsh begs to differ, telling her this is “no town for a girl like you,” and telling her he “has things to do.” He hands her $50 (quite a bit in 1958) for bus fare back to wherever she wants to go, shoulders his luggage and heads for the nearest inn — which proves to be what is now, and already was then, the Central Hotel, at Second and Mulberry.

Hirsh has a bellboy deposit a $5,500 bank draft in one of the local banks for him — not the bank where his jewelry store owner brother Frank Hirsh (Arthur Kennedy)  is on the board of directors, but in the other one — a deliberate, calculated slight. Frank soon finds out about this, looks up Dave, puts on a show of being glad to see him, then chides him — gently — about putting his money in the other bank. “I thought that would really crack you up,” Dave deadpans — one of a multitude of ironic, sardonic one-liners in the film.

Frank talks Dave into coming to his house for dinner — despite having argued on the phone with his wife earlier about it. She had absolutely refused to have “that man in my house.” So when they arrive there in Frank’s car — passing through downtown Madison and giving you a good look at how it appeared in 1958 — Frank makes a lame excuse to Dave about his wife’s having to attend “a women’s meeting” that evening. But she pops out of the house, surprising both brothers, and is embarrassingly “charming” to Dave, bringing a couple of cynical looks from him. Dave gets to meet his teenage niece, their daughter, who seems a lot more genuine than her social climbing, hypocritical parents. And then a college professor friend arrives with his beautiful daughter, Gwen, also a teacher at the local college. That’s Martha Hyer, who many critics said was “miscast” in this role, but I don’t think so. Dave Hirsh apparently doesn’t think so, either, as he studies her as closely in the living room as an art critic might examine a Rembrandt which had been lost for 300 years. Gwen notices his staring, blushes, glances down, then back at Hirsh; she’s not sure where to look under his extended once-over of her charms.

The Hirshes, the professor and his daughter go to dinner at the local country club. Dave Hirsh falls for Gwen, big-time. She’s attracted to him, but she keeps telling him it’s his writing talent she’s really interested in. They part company after he makes some mild (verbal) advances, which she rejects with schoolmarmish stiffness. But she gets off another of the film’s ironic, humorous lines when, in telling Dave that she wants to encourage his writing, she adds, “I started to say I want to STIMULATE you!” One wonders how some of these lines got by the anal film censors of 1958. Notice one line in the ad for the movie that accompanies this review.

At Smitty’s bar in Parkman, Dave Hirsh meets Bama Dillert (Dean Martin), a foot-loose professional gambler who has decided to stay in town for a while and see how good the pickings are. Dave also having a fondness for the 52-card pastime, the two become pals and poker partners, and Dave moves in with Bama. He also runs into Ginny Moorhead again, at the bar where he goes to play cards with Bama and the boys. She has taken a job at the local brassiere factory. She is also being pursued by a small-time hood from Chicago, Raymond, who is convinced she is “his” girlfriend.

Dave and Ginny are leaving the bar late that night after running into each other there when Dave comes in to play poker with Bama and his buddies. Raymond, hiding around the corner, attacks Dave, they get into a fistfight, the police are called, and Dave winds up in jail for a few hours, until Frank bails him out. The next day Frank comes to Bama’s digs and gives Dave a lecture centered on how badly Dave’s antics will affect Frank’s reputation, until Dave flares up and orders him out.

Dave borrows Bama’s car, buys himself some civilian clothes (he came home in his Army uniform and has had it on ever since), and goes out to visit Gwen at her home, taking some of his writings with him. He’s clean and sober, they chat about his work, and then he springs a surprise on her: “I’m in love with you, Gwen.”

She is flabbergasted, almost speechless, and doesn’t react with the gushing enthusiasm Dave may have expected. But, we can tell she is intrigued.

Later at Bama’s place he invites Dave to travel around Indiana with him on a “poker tour,” hopefully to win some big pots. No sooner said than done, accompanied by Ginny and another girl who is following Bama like a faithful dog. While packing, Bama (branded a “misogynist” by most reviewers of the film) tells his friend, “You know Dave, the thing about them pigs (his slang term for women), is they either take orders, or they give ’em. And if you let them give ’em, they start gettin’ mean on you.”

The first stop is Terre Haute (I spent a week there one afternoon), where the four wind up at a nightclub. Both women get drunk, and some of the funniest moments of the movie result. Later, in walks Frank Hirsh’s daughter, accompanied by a middle-aged traveling salesman who has “picked her up” that afternoon. She ran away from home after accidentally seeing her father, “parking” with his young secretary, at a rural tryst popular with many in Parkman. Dave, outraged at the salesman, tells him in no uncertain terms to get lost, and has Ginny take his niece to the ladies’ room to get reasonably sobered up so he can put her on a bus back to Parkman.

Later, in an Indianapolis poker game, Bama gets into a fight with one of the players and receives a stab wound, for which he has to go into the hospital. There, he learns that he is in the advanced stages of diabetes, but declines the doctor’s advice to go on insulin and watch his diet. He and Dave leave the hospital after Bama demands his clothes and refuses to stay any longer.

Dave Hirsh had talked on the phone with Gwen during the Indianapolis poker game, and upon their arrival back in Parkman, he visits her, manuscript for the book he wrote but was never able to get published, in hand. They walk out to a cabin on the property where Gwen begins reading the manuscript while Dave paces and smokes nervously outside, a spectacular view of the Indiana-Kentucky Electric Corporation’s three smokestacks holding the center of the shot. Dave’s only companions during his wait are a female rabbit who runs through, stops and wiggles her nose, then races off; and the male who follows her a minute or two later. “Your girlfriend went that way,” Dave grins, pointing.

Finally, Gwen calls, “Dave, come here!” When he re-enters the cabin, she is sitting with the manuscript in hand, turned to the final page, her face entranced. She loved the story. He is amazed, and then delighted. And then, he starts gently pulling the bobby pins out of her hair, letting it flow down over her shoulders from the French roll she had it in; they embrace and kiss, framed by the sun-lit window of the cabin; and then, they make love.

Stop breathing so hard, dear readers; you don’t actually get to see anything. This is 1958 — remember? The frame dissolves into darkness on their embrace. We must use our imagination …

But — here comes the scene that changes everything in the movie. Ginny Moorhead, who is madly in love with Dave by now and has pretty much told him so, goes out to the college a day or two later and looks up Professor Gwen, who doesn’t know her from a load of hay. In her transparent, totally guileless way, Ginnie tells Gwen how much she loves Dave, but adds that, if he and Gwen are in love, she’ll willingly withdraw from the scene and return to Chicago. Gwen is thunderstruck to hear this, naturally; she changes color, stammers slightly, then assures Ginnie that the field is clear for her. Ginnie, delighted and grateful, eases out the door, still thanking Gwen, as the bell rings for her next class.

When Dave goes to Gwen’s house that evening, her father meets him, with patently phony excuses about how she “won’t be able to see you tonight.” Dave goes to the foot of the stairs, yells, “Gwen! I’m coming up!” and ascends, two steps at a time. Searching door by door, he finds Gwen in her bedroom (decent, though) and she is affronted at his coming in. He asks her what’s wrong, repeatedly tells her he loves her, and is met with frosty rebuffs (she never hints about Ginny’s visit to her). Finally, hurt and baffled, Dave walks out, and Gwen collapses weeping at her dressing table.

Dave returns to Bama’s house, finds Ginny there on the porch with copies of a magazine where a story of his has just been published, and flies into a rage when she tells him she has been “signing autographs all day!” “Don’t you know you don’t autograph something you didn’t write?” he barks, adding a few choice words about her cluelessness and storming into the house.

Crushed and very hurt, Ginny follows him into the house, tells him how much she loves him and that she hadn’t meant to make him mad, and collapses in his arms, weeping. Moved by her emotions and her transparency, Dave softens, takes her in his arms and soothes her. Then he asks her if she’d like to clean up the mess in Bama’s front room. Delighted that he’s friendly again, she precedes to do so.

Later, we see them sitting, Dave in a chair, Ginny on the floor, as Dave finishes reading his short story aloud from the magazine to her. Finishing, he asks her, “What did you think of it?” “Oh, I just loved it!” Ginnie gushes. “What did you like about it?” he continues. “Well … EVERYTHING!” she answers. Visibly becoming annoyed, Dave says, “What things in particular did you like?” “Well … the whole THING!” is the only answer she can manage. He becomes enraged again at her inability to be an informed “literary critic” for him, and she gets as close to anger as she ever does in the film, telling him that he’s always getting mad at her for no reason and that it’s unfair.

Chastened, Dave thinks about that for a few minutes as Ginny sits, face turned away. Then we see an idea forming in his mind; he ponders it for a moment or two, then goes over to put his arm around her and say, “Ginny, let’s get married — tonight!”

She is totally bowled over, unable to believe her ears, until he assures her that he’s serious, and that if she’ll just run home and put on a dressy outfit, he’ll call the local judge to arrange it. Bama comes in just at that minute, and when Dave tells him that they’re about to get married, he is as dumbfounded as Ginny had been a few minutes before. “I got nothing against Ginny, but even SHE knows she’s a pig!” he declares, bringing a storm of offended protest from Ginny.

Dave finally gets his fiancee out the door and headed home to change, and at that point Bama tells him that if he’s really serious, “Then I just lost myself a friend. I’m not being friends with anybody THAT dumb!”

Bama stomps upstairs, leaving Dave alone with his thoughts, and with the necessity of calling the judge.

Later, we see the two in the courtroom, with the judge just finishing pronouncing them “man and wife.” Ginny seems about to joyfully kiss Dave; he looks at her quizzically, and she backs off. Dave pays the two locals who served as witnesses, and the newly marrieds depart, into the downtown where a street carnival has been set up and hundreds of local residents are riding rides, playing games, and eating popcorn and cotton candy.

The few minutes that the newlyweds are wandering through the crowd; a frantic chase that follows immediately after; and a bloody, tragic shooting that seems, in retrospect, as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, are a superb climax to a movie that had featured more dialogue than action to that point.

A few editorial observations on the film, as drama and time capsule:

If you weren’t around Madison yet in 1958, either through not having been born or because you moved to Madison in later years, then note the opening scenes I’ve already mentioned. Besides the Main Street buildings the bus passes, you’ll see it pull up across the street from the old A & P Store, which is currently the site of the Dollar General Store, on Jefferson Street. When Frank and Dave Hirsh are driving to Frank’s home, you’ll notice the old Kocolene gas station; that site is now Fast Max. Frank Hirsh’s jewelry store is located just west of the old Oasis Cafe in the 100 block of West Main; the Oasis was later the Sportsman’s Bar. I drank many a beer there in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The sign on the Oasis is clearly visible in a couple of street shots, one in daytime, the other at night. And in the shot of the carnival personnel starting to unload equipment and local children receiving balloons, note the big clock, which is still standing, in front of the local bank on Main Street; and the Masonic building, in the background.

Young people especially should go see this (or, more likely, rent it or check it out of your local library), not only for the story of a frustrated, embittered man who finds love, loses it, then thinks he’s found it again, but as a look back into a time you never lived in, the 1950s, the Eisenhower years. Note the clothing — it probably appears “senior prom formal” to you, but it’s the way middle-class people tended to dress in those days. And especially, notice how slender nearly everyone is! Hardly a “People of Wal-Mart” obesity in sight, anywhere. Even allowing for the fact that grossly overweight people would hardly have been hired as extras, it shows you how fat and sloppy so many of us have become in the modern era.

Another observation concerns Sinatra’s appearance in the film. His hair was thinning noticeably by this time (he was 42 years old when the filming was done in Madison), but instead of adding hairpieces to his increasingly visible scalp, the director appears to have had make-up put black shoe polish on his head! OK, I’m sure it wasn’t actually shoe polish; but it looks like it.  There are times when Sinatra’s head actually shines like a pair of spit-shined Army boots.

Note the attitudes, also. Men tended to be more assertive and forceful toward women than they are today. It was before the era of “women’s lib,” and most women — middle-class ones, anyway — were housewives and mothers. And the Baby Boom was on; I can think of a number of my classmates in the 1950s who were the oldest of four, five, even six children.

I’ve already mentioned Bama Dillert’s anti-female slurs. Dave Hirsh gets off one of a different complexion as he walks into his brother’s jewelry store in one scene. When a clerk approaches and asks, “Can I help you, Mr. Hirsh?” Dave answers, “Yeah; you got any nose rings? I got a little kid in the Congo and she gets restless.”

That one would hit the cutting-room floor, posthaste, nowadays. But 1958 was a different era, a different world. “Some Came Running” is a great time machine to give you a look at it.