So-so. Is fairly interesting at the start, as the scene-setting is intriguing. However, it doesn't ever seem to get beyond scene-setting, and after a while just drags and doesn't seem to go anywhere.Frank Sinatra is disappointing in the lead role. He overdoes the alpha male stuff, and just doesn't seem convincing. Pick of the performances has to go to Shirley MacLaine, who is sweet and delightful as Ginny Moorhead. MacLaine well deserved her Best Leading Actress Oscar nomination. Good support from from Arthur Kennedy, Martha Hyer and Dean Martin.

Frank Sinatra's got those little-town blues in this lovely if overlong potboiler co-starring his Rat Pack consigliere Dean Martin and a number of characters summed up by Sinatra in a single word: "Dames!"Just out of the Army, Dave Hirsh (Sinatra) is a once-promising writer who wakes up after a drunk in the town he thought he left for good 16 years ago. Reacquainting himself with his shallow brother Frank (Arthur Kennedy), Dave finds himself disgusted by the middle-class hypocrisy all around him. But making a clean break from Parkman, Indiana proves difficult when Dave falls for a pretty college teacher (Martha Hyer) who admires his work."Some Came Running" is an example of a film that doesn't work despite some strong talent around it. Sinatra plays his role smoothly yet with a striking naturalness, especially early on. Cinematographer William H. Daniels paints his canvas with lurid colors that immerse the viewer. Martin does fine work as a smoothie card-sharp with a cold heart, while Shirley MacLaine steals her scenes with amusing panache. Walking around with a rabbit-doll purse and too much make-up, she makes the most of lines like: "What am I, a tramp or something?"Actually, her character Ginny is more like a doormat, someone who thinks Dave is just swell and can't wait to be his girlfriend, never mind what he thinks. Dave wants the schoolteacher, Gwen, who if you were quoting Sinatra's music, might be called "the fair Miss Frigidaire."Watching Dave plead his case to Gwen is agonizing, and director Vincente Minnelli can't get enough of it. It's horrible dialogue, perfunctorily delivered by Hyer. Between her and the writers, Sinatra has nothing to work off here.Him: "I think I'm in love with you."Her: "You said that with the ease of a man who's said it often to quite an assortment of women."Him: "So help me, I didn't know there were women like you."The whole relationship between Dave and Gwen kicks off when she looks at his unfinished manuscript (which is helpfully labeled "Unfinished Story by Dave Hirsh") and, after reading it in one afternoon, declares it perfect for printing as is. Whereupon Dave declares "Of course!" and agrees to send it to the Atlantic straightaway. The magazine even prints it, too.Of course, true love never runs smooth, especially in a Sirk-y melodrama with "Peyton Place" affectations. While the small-town atmosphere of Parkman gets much play, one never sees how Dave is so hampered by it. He annoys his brother by getting in the newspapers over minor scrapes, but Dave is pretty much a free man here, as his card-playing expeditions with Dean Martin's "Bama" character demonstrate.Watching Sinatra and Martin together for the first time is a real treat, especially with MacLaine in the mix. Here again, the script bites off more than it can chew by giving Bama some serious issues it never develops, but watching the two men play cards and cut wise in a bar is fun. Dino and Frank's scenes utilize the stars' easy charm and humor, even if they don't add to the story.But then again, what story? It's all boils down to a silly romance we can't wait to end, and something that passes as social commentary about people living lies in small towns. I don't think James Jones, who wrote the novel this was based on, had anything like this story in mind. I enjoy watching Sinatra in it, but it does him no favors.

I saw this film when released in 1957 and really did not like it. I knew people were impressed with Shirley McLaine's acting but to a young guy like me it missed the emotion of a "rat pack" film, which I thought it was. I never gave too much thought to this film, but recently I read that the "Cahiers du Cinema" had placed it among the 100 all time best films ever made. Noticing it was going to be shown on TV I saw it and was amazed. All the actors are excellent and so is Minneli's direction, apart from the last scenes of the killer going wild, this film did not age. The beauty of the film is in the characters. First there is Arthur Kennedy and his wife trying to climb up the social ladder in what we could describe as an "obsessive " way, but that was so typical of a small town in America in the fifties. Then there are Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the outcasts, but which still fit the category of the bohemians kind of barely accepted . But then comes Shirley McLaine which does not fit anywhere, at first sight you would classify her as a tramp, but she is not one at all, she is just a wonderful person, too naive in her ways, but trying to survive a hard life. She breaks all the rules, she is the opposite of Martha Hyer a compulsive conventional person. When Frank Sinatra, after being rejected by Hyer, decides to marry Shirley, he is accepting the unconventional, specially when he knows he can help. This film is predicting the social changes that would come in the seventies and that would change America. Shirley McLaine as Ginnie Moorehead was standing for all that.

The screen adaptation of James Jones' novel is little more than a transparent, third-person daydream, presenting every writer's inflated image of himself as the tough, honest, alienated, misunderstood, sensitive, handsome stranger who changes the lives of a stereotypical small town community, from the attractive (but sexually repressed) schoolmarm to the dimwitted (but kindhearted) floozy. Most of the actors are likewise typecast: rat-packers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra (who owed Jones a debt of gratitude for his comeback role in 'From Here to Eternity') do a lot of drinking and card playing; Shirley MacLaine is her usual nutty self; and poor Arthur Kennedy sleepwalks resignedly through his thankless role as the rebel writer's conservative older brother. The film can still be entertaining if seen as a dated post-war soap opera, and here I freely admit my opinions might have been compromised by seeing the film on VHS: the colorful wide-screen production is totally lost in the pan-and-scan video format, leaving the impression that some vital action always occurring just out of frame.