Some Came Running (1958)

An ex-serviceman and failed writer (Frank Sinatra) unwillingly returns to the small midwestern town of his birth where his presence disturbs his social climbing brother (Arthur Kennedy). Two women, an uneducated but goodhearted tramp (Shirley MacLaine in an Oscar nominated performance) and a cultivated schoolteacher (Martha Hyer, also Oscar nominated) both pull him in opposite directions. Based on the massive 1200 page novel by James Jones (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY) and directed by Vincente Minnelli (MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS). One of the great films of the 1950s, this is one of the cinematic highpoints in Minnelli's canon. Only Douglas Sirk has better exploited the melodrama into an art form and infused it with such incisiveness. Minnelli pushes it to the heights of tragedy using visual imagery (the stunning carnival sequence was borrowed by Brian De Palma for his BLOW OUT) to create both the conflicts and hypocrisy of a small post war Midwestern town struggling with the new morality and the changing climate of class and respectability. With Dean Martin, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates, Connie Gilchrist, Marion Ross and Carmen Phillips.