The 1948 movie Frank Sinatra couldn’t stand making: “It was just horrendous”
These days, any singer who fancies themselves as an actor is free to start their movie career in any genre they see fit, but that wasn’t necessarily the case when Frank Sinatra first started alternating between the recording booth and the silver screen.
The ‘Golden Age’ was a haven for typecasting, with many of its biggest stars either unwilling or unable to stretch themselves too far beyond their comfort zone, with the likes of John Wayne, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and even Katharine Hepburn usually found adhering to the archetypes that made them famous.
To a similar extent, that’s what happened to ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’. His first credited role in a feature where he wasn’t playing himself came in the 1944 musical Step Lively, and his next picture was a musical, too. The crooner finally made his dramatic debut four years later in The Miracle of the Bells, but after that, it was right back to musicals for his next five big-screen outings.
With eight of his first nine films all occupying the same genre, Sinatra probably realised that, if he wanted to be taken as seriously as an actor as he was a musician, he needed to show more strings to his bow. As it happened, his tenth movie wasn’t a musical, and 1953’s romantic epic, From Here to Eternity, won him an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
From then on, musicals would become the exception and not the rule, with Guys and Dolls, where he famously feuded with co-star Marlon Brando, his highest-profile return to the medium as Sinatra continued dabbling in crime flicks, westerns, comedies, and thrillers. However, one of those early song-and-dance gigs stuck in his memory longer than it should, and for all the wrong reasons.
It wasn’t until his Oscar-winning turn as Angelo Maggio that Sinatra became a movie star, at least one remotely comparable to his standing in the music business, so when he was trying to prove himself, he wasn’t really in a position to turn down too many offers. As a result, that led him to 1948’s The Kissing Bandit.
In director László Benedek’s comedic musical western, the ‘Rat Pack’ patriarch travels from Boston to California in the 19th century to take over his late father’s job as an innkeeper. Once there, though, he discovers that his old man was actually an infamous outlaw, one who earned his name by planting a smacker on the lips of the women he robbed.
At the box office, The Kissing Bandit was a complete and utter disaster, losing over $2.5 million for the studio. That might not sound like too much, but adjusted for inflation, it’s almost $35 million. Critics weren’t too kind, either, and when reflecting on the film’s failure, Sinatra referred to himself as “star of The Kissing Bandit, the script of which somebody should have put a match to.”
He wasn’t alone in loathing the experience, with Ann Miller, who worked as a dancer on the movie, sharing a scathing opinion of her own: “It was just horrendous.” Meanwhile, Kathryn Grayson, who played the female lead, was so miserable that all she could do was make light of the situation. “We used to joke,” she recalled. “‘What are we going to do for the sequel?'” Needless to say, it wasn’t one that Sinatra recalled very fondly.
