Some Came Running (1958), directed by Vincente Minnelli. Streaming at home on Tuesday, January 3.

This turgid soap opera of small-town life comes to us from one Vincente Minnelli who, after Douglas Sirk, was America’s greatest practitioner of melodrama. His pop explosions of color painting the roiling distress of middle America absolutely fascinates me for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s fun to watch Sinatra and Dean Martin pal around, as their chemistry was calm, cool and collected. But Minnelli’s also crafted incredible tracking shots and glorious barroom moments that really captured this country in its supposed heyday, the 1950s. This movie is not only bursting with color, has a score that is just booming, a cast to die for, but is rich with period detail, from the downtown, with its department stores and mom and pop groceries and jewelry stores, to its packed barrooms, to the weird and stuffy homes of this little burg’s upper crust families living in their faux-plantation mansions overlooking the Ohio River. And I love that Some Came Running takes place in one of those little cities that are all over this country, towns of 25,000 to 50,000 people, not often in movies. Usually 50s films took place in small, small towns or bustling big cities.

Minnelli sure had a pile to work with: James Jones’ massive, and massively panned, novel. I’ve actually read three of his books–From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and a novella called The Pistol. These are three genuinely shocking exposes of military life, rife with violence, boredom, rampant homosexuality (amongst men who would consider themselves straight–I still have yet to find a writer of military life, then or now, discuss this with such brazen honesty), and two of them made highly acclaimed movies, the first of which is one of my favorites.

But Some Came Running! Fuck all, I’ve been trying to read this fat bastard for years, and failing, because it is awful. With the exception of The Pistol, all of Jones’ books are long, 700-800 pages, but this story of a returning soldier to his small, oppressive burg was nearly 1,300 pages. I cannot fathom what he could be writing about it–this is the stuff of soap opera, of an alcoholic soldier, a nearly failed writer, fighting against the era’s stuffed shirts. For 1,300 pages! Jesus. In some respects, I think it would be good to flesh out what’s going on, because the film Some Came Running does pack in way too much, some of it–like Dean Martin’s Bama being diagnosed with diabetes in the last 30 minutes (why leave that in?) The movie is also, at times, wretchedly misogynistic, as I assume the book was. Then again, that was pretty much how it was back in the 1950s as well.

And that’s the thing with Some Came Running: no one, not one single person, seems happy. They’re utterly miserable. Everyone has their heads caught between the pincers of 1950s life, of the very narrow corridors within which you could live, and they all drink and gossip and claw and fail even as think they’re succeeding.

And, sigh, Shirley MacLaine. Shirley MacLaine’s Ginny is treated so poorly in this movie it just kills me. She sure was cast as women who get smacked around by life, much like Shelley Winters, another of my favorite actors whom Hollywood didn’t know what to do with. Look at her here, with her silly stuffed animal rabbit purse, her lucky pillow, crazy make-up, just trying to get Frank Sinatra’s awful Dave Hirsh to love her. Shirley MacLaine alone makes this movie worth watching, and she’ll break your heart. Sometimes that’s a good thing.