The Man With the Golden Arm

Frankie Machine’s arm of the title makes money as an illegal card dealer and makes trouble as a pin cushion for heroin fixes in Otto Preminger’s raw, joyless The Man With the Golden Arm. Frank Sinatra earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance as Frankie, a former drug addict just released from a recovery facility to return to his dreary life in a dreary apartment with his soul-sucking, wheelchair-bound fraud of a wife (Eleanor Parker) whose selfishness leads to a murder rap for Frankie. Despite romantic notions of becoming a professional drummer, it doesn’t take long for Frankie to descend back into hell, especially since his life is confined to a couple city blocks crawling with hustlers and lowlifes, most threateningly his scumbag drug dealer Louie (a perfectly despicable Darren McGavin) who stalks him and taunts him until he gives in to the fix. Kim Novak plays Molly Novotny, a kindhearted strip joint hostess and Frankie’s only ray of hope. With animated opening credits by the legendary Sol Bass and constant brassy jazz by composer Elmer Bernstein, the film utilizes its studio-bound sets to establish feelings of both community and claustrophobia, both interiors and exteriors designed with an extra helping of scuzziness, brutality oozing out of the woodwork in the form of fistfights, falling bodies, and a terrifying night of drug withdrawal in a locked room.