How Frank Sinatra made an enemy of Cary Grant
Film sets can be pressure-cooker environments. Larger-than-life personalities can clash. Weather conditions can make things both physically uncomfortable and financially compromised, and creative differences between the actors, director, and producers can get downright ugly. There are countless famous stories of nightmare productions, from the catastrophe-ridden set of Waterworld to the notoriously rancorous creation of The Island of Dr Moreau.
In some cases, all the drama off-screen is vindicated by what is captured on screen. Apocalypse Now is probably the most famous example of a production that was completely and utterly disastrous and led to one of the greatest movies of all time. More often than not, however, the chaos behind the scenes is reflected in the final product.
Such was the case with the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion, which was set during the Napoleonic Wars and starred Cary Grant as a British captain who is sent to Spain to transport a cannon back to the UK. Frank Sinatra was cast (somehow) as a Spanish guerrilla leader named Miguel, and Sophia Loren was cast as his girlfriend, who falls for Grant’s character. This set-up might have you raising your eyebrows already, but suffice it to say that all of it pales in comparison to what was going on behind the scenes.
Director Stanley Kramer would go on to make some truly classic movies, including The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. However, The Pride and the Passion was only his second feature, and he quickly realised that things were rushing out of his control. Aside from the challenges of working in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship and having to move a giant cannon across a huge swath of the country, Kramer was nearly done in by the antics of his actors.
Grant and Sinatra instantly became enamoured of Loren, who was in a relationship with the producer Carlo Ponti (whom she would later marry). In his memoir, Kramer said that Loren seemed susceptible to Grant’s advances but was openly disdainful of Sinatra’s. At dinner every evening, the singer would take the opportunity to taunt her in front of the rest of the cast and crew from across the room, which eventually goaded her to shout back.
This, not surprisingly, led to tension between the Grant and Sinatra. When Ponti travelled from Italy to visit the set at one point, the heated love triangle became a quadrangle. When he left, Kramer observed that his leading men seemed to have backed off of their romantic pursuit of their co-star, but the tensions remained.
Then, another issue brewed. Before the film had finished shooting, Sinatra informed the director that he had to leave. He didn’t explain why but said that he was “receiving pressure from some source in the States” and had to get back home immediately. So he jetted back to Hollywood, leaving the production floundering. There were script rewrites (the screenwriters happened to be a married couple in the middle of a divorce and were not on speaking terms) and for the rest of production, Grant had to deliver his lines to Sinatra’s body double. Kramer noted that he did so without complaint, but it’s hard to imagine that the actor wasn’t incensed by the situation.
Not surprisingly, the film was a flop. Even the very real love triangle that was going on between the three lead actors failed to come across on screen, probably because Sinatra’s Spanish accent stole the show for all the wrong reasons. Kramer would later call the film the most challenging of his career.
