Following From Here to Eternity, his acclaimed first novel about American soldiers serving in Hawaii before the Pearl Harbor attack, James Jones spent from here to eternity writing a successor. The result was Some Came Running, a veiled and colourful account of his own writing block. The hero is an ex-soldier novelist who makes a misbegotten return to Parkman, his Midwest home, a place filled with hypocrisy, sexual confusions, and drabness. Ritzy houses with colonnades up here; low dives with prostitutes and gambling down there.

What was Minnelli doing in town? In 1958 he came to the property after Gigi, so exquisitely French, and the drawing-room comedy The Reluctant Debutante. Perhaps the hero drew him in. Dave Hirsh is a tortured artist; Minnelli liked those. No doubt he was attracted to the star player too: Frank Sinatra was already part of the package. And Minnelli liked a challenge; the long, unwieldy novel was certainly that. Maybe he believed that with his strong visual eye, sense of rhythm, and some appropriate casting (Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine, gambler and slut), he could turn a pretentious soap opera into a tragedy. If so, he almost made it.

Three weeks were spent shooting in Madison, Indiana. In 1943 Josef von Sternberg had come there to make the Office of War Information documentary short The Town, where it stood as a symbol of wholesome, integrated small-town America. That wasn’t what Minnelli saw, or what Some Came Running want- ed. He didn’t want documentary realism either; the film is always spinning into extravagance. Supposedly, Minnelli took his visual inspiration from juke-boxes: there’s certainly plenty of flashing neon. For the penultimate carnival sequence, he carefully builds tension with murderer and prey deliriously cross-cut, and sets, music, extras, and bullets fused. It could be an opera, almost, or a ballet.

Despite the gaudy artifice this film retains a human face, partly thanks to Shirley MacLaine. In films since 1955, she was still considered an oddity; Variety said her hair “looks like it was combed with an eggbeater”. But through Minnelli’s handling and the force of her acting she makes Ginny the tramp a figure of pathos.

Geoff Brown