'Sinatra: All or Nothing at All' Is All-Frank
Filled with great music, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All is a two-night, four-hour documentary that covers Frank Sinatra’s career up through his 1971 retirement concert in Los Angeles. Director Alex Gibney — as if he didn’t have enough to do swatting at Scientology with his recent documentary Going Clear — seizes on rarely-seen footage of that concert and constructs a narrative of Sinatra’s life that is at once familiar, adulatory, unflattering, and sometimes revelatory.
Sinatra designed the 1971 concert as 11 songs that would trace the chronology of his career, which makes a logical framework for Gibney to follow. Anyone unfamiliar with Sinatra’s story will be amply educated and entertained. Anyone who’s a Sinatra fan won’t learn a lot new, but that hardly matters, given the pleasure of hearing Sinatra in his prime, and being reminded of his central place in the history of American popular song.
The miracle remains that a skinny working-class kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, could rise to become one of the most innovative, savvy, and powerful figures in show business. Gibney connects all the right dots. He captures Sinatra’s rise from lead singer for 1940s big bands to the solo-act pop star who was the first to chip away at the popularity of the previous vocal innovator, Bing Crosby. Or as Sinatra, ever indelicate, puts it, “Somebody’s gotta challenge this bum.”
In turn, Sinatra would be dismayed by the rise of rock and roll and Elvis Presley, who in the 1950s elicited the screams that Sinatra once had drawn. But in between these touchstone moments, the musical and emotional journey of Sinatra is well-traced. His rise and fall and rise — from bobby-soxer teen idol to washed-up brawler to Oscar-winner for From Here to Eternity — is chronicled with voiceover observations from Sinatra, his children (Nancy and Tina are shrewdly knowing; Frank Jr. seems clueless), his wives (all hail the wisdom and beauty of Ava Gardner), and his industry collaborators including arranger Nelson Riddle, with whom Sinatra made some of his greatest recordings.
Every viewer will have his or her areas of interest and tedium when it comes to a life as big as Sinatra’s. I, for example, am less interested in hearing yet again about the singer’s tangled relationships with President John F. Kennedy and mobsters than I am in hearing how introspective Sinatra was regarding his technique and craft (I wanted to hear a lot more about Sinatra’s self-commandment “do not break a phrase” and similar vocal strategies). Maybe you will feel the opposite. When it comes to gossip, I was intrigued to hear about his brief 1960s marriage to Mia Farrow as told mostly by Mia Farrow, articulated in her unique blend of bland frankness.
One could quibble with aspects of Gibney’s documentary. Certainly he seems uninterested in Sinatra’s film career after the career-reviving From Here to Eternity Oscar — Sinatra’s superb performance in the amazing The Manchurian Candidate (indeed, his decision to do this remarkable, radical film in the first place) is given woefully short shrift, for example.
But really, the complaints are minor. Sinatra’s retirement in 1971 lasted only two years — he couldn’t stay out of the limelight — but the footage from that concert is indeed great. It was worth building a four-hour monument around such artistry.
Sinatra: All or Nothing at All airs Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. on HBO.
