The forgotten ‘Die Hard’ prequel starring Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra, otherwise known as ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’, ‘Chairman of the Board’, and Mia Farrow’s most unlikely husband, hogged a lot of the success in Hollywood for a good 40 years. Sure, he had his ups and downs. There was a period in the early 1950s when it seemed that he was past his peak, and his tumultuous marriage to Ava Gardner nearly ruined him and everyone who had the misfortune to work with him at the time. And there were all those alleged Mafia connections, of course.
In general, however, Sinatra ruled the charts and the box office for an astonishing number of years, moving from an icon of classical Hollywood and old-school crooners to the counterculture of the 1960s and beyond. He didn’t even record some of his most famous music until the 1980s. ‘New York, New York,’ which is now a ubiquitous anthem of the Big Apple, was first put on vinyl in the 1980 triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future, and it has become one of his most recognisable songs.
With all of his success (being an Oscar winner, being one of the most successful music artists of all time, etc.), It’s easy to forget some of the lower-level triumphs of Sinatra’s career, such as the fact that he was the original John McClane.
Take a moment, if you will, to imagine Ol’ Blue Eyes tip-toeing barefoot around Nakatomi Plaza in a tank top. Seriously, close your eyes for a second and envision it. Would he be wearing a fedora? Would he be clutching a microphone like a child clutches a security blanket? Would he still have that little curl in his hair to remind us that he was once an idol of the teenage bobby-soxers? I sincerely hope that the answer is ‘yes’ on all counts.
The reason Sinatra was first in line for the role that eventually became Bruce Willis’s entire career and one of the most beloved action heroes of all time is that he had already starred in a movie called The Detective. Released in 1968, the film is a hardboiled crime drama in which Sinatra played a police detective named Joe Leland who investigates the brutal murder of a gay man in San Francisco.
The publicity for the film boasted that it was ‘As adult and revealing as any film can be,’ which is a pretty tall claim, but by the conventions of cinema at the time, it was indeed pretty bold. Audiences agreed. It was the 20th highest-grossing movie of the year, which is not too shabby for a low-budget potboiler.
The film was based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Roderick Thorp. In 1979, Thorp wrote a sequel, Nothing Lasts Forever, in which Leland, now retired, visits a high-rise office building in Los Angeles to visit his daughter during her office Christmas party. When a group of German terrorists led by a man named Anton ‘Little Tony the Red’ Gruber take the building hostage, Leland leaps into action.
This was, as you can probably guess, the source material for Die Hard. When Fox started developing the film in the mid-80s, they were contractually obligated to offer the role of Leland (then changed to John McClane) to Sinatra because he had originated the character in The Detective. Luckily for Willis and moviegoers the world over, he turned it down. At 70, he just didn’t think he had the pep in his step to revive the character. Given that he was already looking a little long in the tooth in the 1968 film, he clearly made the right call.
