This year’s Oscar season birthed no end of controversy, with unearthed racist Tweets, accusations of unethical AI use, and concerns about absent intimacy coordinators clogging up the news cycle. While it’s fun to partake in all this chaos, it’s also important to remember that the Academy Awards do hold some cultural value beyond fueling online discourse.

Not only are the winners immortalized in film history, but even the nominees enjoy an elevated degree of prestige that prevents them from getting completely swallowed up by the relentless march of time.

Otto Preminger’s The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) certainly benefited from being in the Oscar race, with its nods for Best Actor (Frank Sinatra), Best Music, and Best Art Direction ensuring that it remained in the cultural conversation long after it left theatres.

Luckily, this film noir is the kind of movie that actually deserves a longer shelf life. It isn’t some flash-in-the-pan distraction that somehow snuck its way on the Oscar telecast through sleazy backdoor politicking. Preminger’s production is genuinely groundbreaking, being one of the first major Hollywood films to seriously grapple with the issue of hard drug addiction.

But beyond this historical distinction, The Man With The Golden Arm is just a damn good movie in its own right, with stellar performances, dynamic camera work, and a bombastic jazz score that cuts to the bone.

The film follows Frankie Machine (Sinatra), a recovering drug addict who vows to go on the straight and narrow after he’s released from prison. But finding honest work as a musician isn’t so easy for Frankie, especially after ghosts from his past lure him back into the world of illegal card dealing. Frankie also finds himself caught between the affections of two women, his wife Zosh (Eleanor Parker) and old flame Molly (Kim Novak), who represent his possible damnation to or salvation from the cycle of crime and addiction.

Sinatra is obviously the main draw here, coming in hot after winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity (1953). While the crooner didn’t walk away with another golden statuette for headlining The Man With The Golden Arm, his work here is no less extraordinary.

Given the subject matter, it would have been easy to present a completely deranged character who rapidly shifts between big emotions to sell their less-than-ideal circumstances. But Sinatra usually plays it somewhere in the middle. He’s very restrained in the early parts of the movie, trying desperately to put his past behind him and carve out a new life through measured hope and optimism.

It’s only when the walls start to close in that he begins to lose his cool, resorting to a much broader acting style that some might consider “hammy” by today’s standards.

But considering the fact that he didn’t have a lot of influences to draw from (with the depiction of hard drug use being largely taboo in Hollywood at the time), Sinatra still presents a nuanced portrait of someone suffering through substance abuse, no doubt setting an entertainment industry standard for decades to come.

The rest of the cast put in similarly impressive work.

Even though they inhabit familiar film noir archetypes (the petty crook, the femme fatale, the heartless drug pusher, the hard-boiled cop, etc.), each actor gives their characters enough depth to keep things interesting.

This is especially true for Kim Novak, who could have easily come across as an evil seductress for preying on a married man. Instead, her concern and affection for Sinatra appears genuine and endearing, making her the most sympathetic player in the film’s overarching love triangle.

Another surprisingly charming character is Sparrow (Arnold Stang), a small-time hustler who is always trying to reel Sinatra into his latest scam. But despite Sparrow’s unsavory modus operandi, Stang manages to play him with a degree of kindness and good humour, so much so that he almost becomes the film’s Jiminy Cricket.

And as cliché as this might sound, one of the movie’s most interesting characters doesn’t actually appear on screen.

This is because the camerawork, led by cinematographer Sam Leavitt, is always engaging, constantly moving and finding interesting ways to frame the characters, illustrating their inner thoughts without strictly relying on dialogue.

One of the best examples of this takes place midway through the film, when Sinatra and Novak stroll by a department store window displaying a shiny new kitchen set. By capturing the character’s snappy back-and-forth dialogue within this backdrop, Leavitt offers the audience an aspirational glimpse into a possible domesticated future where the characters no longer have to scratch and claw to carve out a meager living.

It also doesn’t hurt that the movie captures these kinds of moments in mostly long, unbroken takes, which gives the actors lots of room to breathe and make the most of the script.

Said script, penned by Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer, remains engaging throughout the movie’s runtime, mixing in insightful character moments with the kind of tough-guy dialogue one would expect from a film noir.  

The film’s Oscar-nominated score, composed by Elmer Bernstein, adds to this rhythm, serving as a kind of internal monologue for Sinatra’s state of mind. When those chaotic brass and percussion instruments pick up in speed and intensity, the actor doesn’t have to utter a word about suffering from withdrawal. The music does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Conversely, this emotionally-resonate score also kicks in when Sinatra is sharing a tender moment with Novak or Parker, except this time the composer relies on gentle woodwinds and strings to sell the fact that he is keeping his demons at bay.  

So just like the camerawork, the film’s music almost becomes another colourful member of the cast, or at least some kind of omniscient narrator that adds texture to the story.

That being said, the incorporation of music into the plot itself is a little half-hearted. While Sinatra’s main goal throughout the narrative is to become a professional drummer, his actual talent with the instrument is mostly talked about and only briefly shown. Plus, the big studio audition that the movie’s been building up to is over far too quickly, which slightly blunts the impact of Frankie’s downward spiral.

And while the movie usually does a good job of balancing its goofier elements with hard-hitting drama, that formula can get thrown out of whack sometimes.

Outside of a couple hokey speeches about drug addiction, which wouldn’t be out of place in a 1990s after-school special, the ending leaves a little to be desired.

Without getting into spoilers, one character exits the movie in a very silly fashion right before the credits roll, which caps off the film on a slightly sour note.

But those are just small quibbles, to be sure, and they don’t take away from The Man With The Golden Arm being the real deal.

Anyone who enjoys the look and feel of movies from that era of Hollywood can find it in spades with this production, with plenty of talented people working in front of and behind the camera.

And while it didn’t walk away with any golden statuettes at the 1956 Oscars, the film did legitimately push boundaries by allowing different kinds of stories (in this case, hard drug addiction) to appear on the big screen.

Because of the film’s controversial subject matter, the Production Code Administration (enforcers of the conservative Hays Code) refused to give it a seal of approval, thereby limiting its distribution in North America.

But after the movie garnered a lot of buzz without this seal, the Motion Picture Association of America eventually pressured the PCA to revise its code and allow drug addiction to be allowed in the movies.

And honestly, busting up obtuse censorship guidelines might be a better legacy to leave behind over winning big at the Academy Awards, especially given the tired discourse that plays out every time a movie brings home an Oscar.   

Verdict:

9/10

Corner store companion:

Golden Oreos (because they’re delicious and a lot less addictive than heroin)

Fun facts:

–Release date: December 15, 1955

–Budget: $1 million

–Box office: $4.3 million

–The Man With The Golden Arm finally received its PCA production code in 1961, six years after the film’s initial release. The PCA and the Hays Code were discarded in 1968 and were replaced by the modern MPAA rating system that same year.

–The Man With The Golden Arm was inducted into the United States’ National Film Registry in 2020 for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” It was added alongside classic films such as The Blues Brothers (1980), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Dark Knight (2008), and Grease (1978).

-Actor Arnold Stang (who plays Sparrow) is probably best known for voicing the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Top Cat for several decades.

–The Man With The Golden Arm is currently in the public domain and can be watched in its entirety on YouTube. Please watch using the provided link below and don’t bother with the official YouTube upload (since it’s been colourized and looks awful).