Some Came Running

Wonderful stuff.

This film captures the disillusionment of returning WWII vets, and brilliantly addresses itself to many of the director's characteristic concerns--masculine fear of domestication and attendant resentment of women; the tensions of masculine friendship; women's complicity in their own oppression; the compromises demanded of artists functioning under capitalism.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

If Some Came Running survives its dated gender politics, that’s all due to MacLaine. Her Ginnie—overly made up and yet disheveled, with hamburger bun crumbs on her sparkly cocktail dress—is the only one to lend the movie an authentic sense of dignity.

A rambling fat memoir about a soldier returning home to a Midwestern city, where his roughhouse, bravura ways tear the delicate social fabric apart, has lots of sleazy, low-life glamour on the screen. Scenarist John Patrick and director Vincente Minnelli made it work in this memorable 1959 film.

It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.

Stylish enough, but the plodding story inhibits the smooth sophistication of the film's stars.