An early-career milestone for Kim Novak, who stars alongside Frank Sinatra, this honest, raw depiction of a man’s addiction to heroin was a shocking outlier in its era of release.
A landmark of postwar American cinema, 1955 classic The Man with the Golden Arm takes an unflinching look at the psychological impacts of addiction with a startling candour that shattered Hollywood taboos at the time. After a stint getting clean in prison, aspiring jazz drummer Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra, From Here to Eternity) returns to Chicago’s chaotic backstreets, where he struggles to rebuild his life within the constraints of a manipulative marriage and the suffocating pull of old habits, battling the allure of heroin.
Columbia Pictures agreed to loan Kim Novak to United Artists after Otto Preminger specifically requested to cast her in the role of Molly Novotny, Frankie’s sympathetic girlfriend; it proved to be a breakthrough role for her. Sinatra likewise delivers a career-defining performance, while Eleanor Parker (The Sound of Music) is deliciously wicked as Frankie’s seemingly hapless wife. Adapted from Nelson Algren’s uncompromising novel and featuring a groundbreaking jazz score by Elmer Bernstein, Preminger’s Oscar-nominated film, released without the Production Code seal of approval, remains a devastating character study laden with moral ambiguity.
Content: Melbourne International Film Festival
[Sinatra’s] Oscar-nominated performance in The Man With the Golden Arm simmers with desperation and weariness … [Preminger] amp[s] up the claustrophobic tension in beautifully choreographed long takes.
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