Tony Rome (1967) American movies and culture may have started to undergo major upheavals in the 1960's, but you'd never know it from the studio vehicles put out by the veteran Hollywood superstars. For them and their movies.......life stayed the same......
The film universes inhabited by the Icons maintained the same comforting worldviews since the films they started making in the l940's.....
Doris Day still defended her virtue, John Wayne still shot down bad guys.....and Frank Sinatra was still the hippest cat in the room....ring-a-ding-ding, baby.....doobie-doobie-doo.....
Very little of the real world at large ever intruded their into their films......which, to us, didn't decrease their entertainment value......but did make these movies instantly, quaintly archaic, even at the moment of their release into theaters.....
Hitting its 50th anniversary this year, Frank Sinatra's "Tony Rome" arrived as a sun-drenched, set in Miami version of a standard meat 'n potatoes noir-ish Private Eye movie....
Sinatra's daughter Nancy sings the simple, bouncy title tune.......far more of a comfort zone for her severely limited vocal range than the monumental John Barry title song for "You Only Live Twice", which she painfully struggled through earlier in the year.
And the movie gets off to a zippy start with a zoom shot that homes in on some young girl's ass with the precision of a surgical nuclear strike.....hey, remember what year this was made......
Like many movie and book P.I's, Tony is a disillusioned, cynical former cop who now skirts the edges of the law as he digs into the sleazy mysteries presented to him. His latest case, involving a dysfunctional wealthy family and a missing diamond pin, gets him regularly punched, chloroformed and shot at. As the bodies pile up, Sinatra trades suggestive quips with a been-there-done-that
divorcee-playgirl (Jill St. John) who thankfully wanders in and out of the movie (and the plot) in hip-hugging outfits and bikinis......
Sinatra makes his notorious impatience and limited attention span for the slow pace of making a movie work for him here. (How he would have loved collaborating with one-take-and-we're-done director Clint Eastwood). His casual, distracted line readings fit Tony Rome's blase attitude perfectly.......and fortunately, he's backed up by a solid cast of dependable character actors like Simon Oakland, Richard Conte and Robert Wilke)
The film leisurely strolls around various locations in Miami Beach.....(or as St.John's character cracks, "20 miles of sand in search of a city....") Sinatra picks up clues here and there, clashes with suspects and thugs.....(this may be the only movie we've seen that includes death-by-vase).....and periodically stops to ogle St.John while she doles out her dialogue with weary sarcasm.
And that's about it.....a slickly put together studio package that doesn't look much different from the 500 or so private eye movies that preceded it.......with the possible exception of a scene in which a much bemused Sinatra stands back to watch a passive-aggressive pair of lesbians put on a soap opera melodrama in front of him.
You can sort of call "Tony Rome" a product of its time.......but even in 1967, movies like this were rapidly beginning to look old school and old fashioned.......
For us, the film's final moments wonderfully preserve that smirky, hipster vibe of 60's movies that always make us grin.....(the attitude that Mike Meyers plumbed for laughs in his three Austin Powers capers....)
As Jill St. John walks away from him, Sinatra's head bounces side to side to the rhythm of her rotating rear end......and that earns her another of those guided missile zoom shots into her backside, filling up the Panavision screen with her ample bottom. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)......as Austin Powers would say, " Yeah, Baby!"
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