- #WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK MOVIE#
- #WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK SERIES#
- #WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK TV#
When they returned, studio head Sol Siegel was with them, making sure filming could resume. They left-they went to the airport!” MacLaine recounted. “That is when Dean and Frank said, ‘Oh yeah, well, screw this,’ and they got on a plane. Instead of asking his crew to move the camera, Minnelli-true to grand MGM tradition-asked them to move the Ferris wheel. A carnival was the set for one of the climactic scenes, with a Ferris wheel in the background, which was slightly out of focus. “I want her to be dead, because I want her to get an Oscar nomination,” Sinatra told studio executives, of MacLaine’s character in the movie. They were also responsible for their careers. “They loved it when things would go wrong, and then they could really be themselves, to show the audience that they actually were real.” “They did exactly what came to them at the moment, and if they all acted like that at the same time, it was very humorously chaotic,” MacLaine recalled.
Sinatra and Martin liked to ad-lib, just as MacLaine had done, by chance, in her Personality Test. Though produced in MGM’s lavish palette-which Minnelli was using for the musical Gigi at almost the same time- Some Came Running was freewheeling film noir, prompted, to some extent, by its spontaneous stars. The movies themselves were also covering new ground. Torn between her and a professor’s daughter, he befriends a gambler and lives on the wrong side of the small town’s tracks. Sinatra requested that MacLaine be “lent out” to MGM for the film, based on James Jones’s novel about a disillusioned writer who returns to his hometown in the company of a girl he met on the bus.
#WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK MOVIE#
“That’s where the Personality Test was born.”īy the time MGM reached the Indiana set of Some Came Running, a new kind of movie star was maturing. “All those questions were personality questions, so they were spontaneous and without any forethought at all,” she explained. While MacLaine moved, he asked about her life-where she went to school, how she learned to dance. Wallis spotted her in The Pajama Game on Broadway-as a last-minute replacement for the musical’s injured star. MacLaine’s first film, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, had opened three years earlier, after Paramount producer Hal B. “How many times did I answer the door because the cannolis had arrived by private plane from Hollywood?” she laughed. MacLaine shared a house with Rat Packers Sinatra and Martin during the filming. In 1958, veteran MGM director Vincente Minnelli decamped to Madison, Indiana, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and 24-year-old Shirley MacLaine to make the familial drama Some Came Running. Previously in the series: Debbie Reynolds, Leslie Caron, Margaret O'Brien, and Angela Lansbury.
#WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK SERIES#
This is the last in a series of interviews with the stars who remember MGM at its best-and how it fell from grace. With Reynolds gone, the number of stars who knew MGM at its mightiest grows ever-smaller. But Reynolds, in fact, joined the system at the very end and was one of the last stars created by MGM before the once-mighty studio declined in the 1950s. So whatever the view of them, be they dirty rats or swinging cats, the legacy endures over half a century later.When she died in December at the age of 84, Debbie Reynolds was remembered as one of the last great stars of Hollywood's studio era, when singing-and-dancing talents were plucked out of obscurity as teenagers, signed under contract to the studio, and turned into stars by a mighty studio machine. Read another story from us: Rita Hayworth – The Ups and Downs of Hollywood’s Original Love Goddess And tribute acts have captured the magic of these independent spirits around the world.
#WHO WAS PART OF THE RAT PACK TV#
Sinatra’s pack were explored in a 1998 TV movie starring Ray Liotta. The Rake writes that the Pack “achieved much more than their own success, helping to establish the transformative new world of the sixties every bit as much as the rock ’n roll generation that came after them, expressing the thought that there might be more to life than work, family and duty.” Some see a deeper meaning among the fun and games. They shared a brotherly love that lasted through the years, belting out tunes, making movies (such as Sixties classics Ocean’s 11 and Robin and the 7 Hoods) and generally ensuring everyone was having a good time.
The Rat Pack with Jack Entratter at the Sands, 1960.įor him “the Clan” was a better description.