Movie Review The Man With The Golden Arm

Tweet

1955 – Spoiler alerts Not to be confused with the similarly named James Bond film, The Man With The Golden Gun, this is a gritty realistic noir thriller looking full on at the tragedy and horrors of drug addiction. It proved to be a censorship code busting sensation. The name of the drug used is never mentioned though it is obviously heroin. Frank Sinatra, in an Oscar nominated non-singing role, plays a small town guy called Frankie Machine, who has just come out of rehab having narrowly kicked his habit under controlled medical support. In the clinic and prisons he learned that he has some skills as a drummer and he has been offered a chance to get auditions to play them with a band. Life seems to be looking up for Frankie. Alas, he is also surrounded by his old friends, and his ultra-sleazy former drug dealer is losing money because Frankie has gone straight so he is determined to get Frankie back on the drugs again. In addition, Frankie is trapped in a marriage to Zoch, the wheelchair bound wife crippled in a car crash he caused at the height of his first addiction. Except unknown to Frankie, she is faking, milking his pity while making him guilty for the crash in order to stop him having an affair with the beautiful woman in the apartment downstairs, though ultimately the affair will prove to be Frankie’s salvation and Zosh’s damnation too. Scenes of Frankie going cold turkey alone in a locked room are still jaw dropping, (Sinatra watched real drug addicts going through the process at clinics in research for the role) and the film carries a tremendous air of tension and menace conveyed through the brilliant perfectly blended highly atmospheric jazz score by Elmer Bernstein. So why is a routine noir tragedy so ground-breaking? The key is director Otto Preminger’s defiance of the US Hay’s Code of movie censorship. The code was a stranglehold on the arts for decades, and imposed by hard-line right-wing Christian Democrats. The Code was not actually directly enforceable by law, but it could cause problems for cinemas which were prepared to show movies not approved under the code. Such cinemas could receive sudden health & safety inspections that could shut them down on flimsy excuses or contrived accusations, so many movie theatres reluctantly complied with the law. Preminger was notorious for making films that were aimed at busting through the code and The Man With The Golden Arm did well enough on release to change the Code itself. It had to be openly admitted that films that showed major social concerns in an intelligent thoughtful and cautionary way could serve society better than not having such areas touched on or depicted at all. The way was paved for many more serious socially aware movies to follow. The story remains powerful, with Machine’s victory over the Monkey (Heroin) juxtaposed neatly with the almost Greek chorus tragedy of Zosh’s mental disintegration as her charade is brutally exposed in one of the most startling endings to any movie. A classic study of addiction that goes way being the dependency on heroin. Arthur Chappell