The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
Directed by Otto Preminger
When illegal card dealer and recovering heroin addict Frankie Machine gets out of prison, he decides to straighten up. Armed with nothing but an old drum set, Frankie tries to get honest work as a drummer. But when his former employer and his old drug dealer re-enter his life, Frankie finds it hard to stay clean and eventually finds himself succumbing to his old habits.
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What critics compared The Man with the Golden Arm to
Still, it's a solid, if unexceptional dramatic thriller about adult behvaior; minor cinema lifted up on the shoulders of one of the year's best movie star turns, and if it's not likely to stand up as a genuine classic, I can readily see it joining the ranks of The Lost Weekend and The Man with the Golden Arm in the annals of pretty much okay stories of addiction.
Even the best of them — Billy Wilder's 1944 "The Lost Weekend," with Ray Milland dragging his typewriter up Third Ave. to hock it for the price of a drink, or Otto Preminger directing Sinatra as 1955's "The Man with the Golden Arm" — come off as less than the whole story to this survivor of a household ruled by a mean drunk of a British father.
It isn’t the familiarity of what transpires, even great addiction dramas like The Lost Weekend , The Days of Wine and Roses , The Man with the Golden Arm , Clean & Sober , and 28 Days can only play variations on a similar theme as far as their central components are concerned, it’s the direction Braff takes his characters that’s so gosh darn insulting.
But from the credit sequence evoking The Man With the Golden Arm, through the tenement of boho squalor, the Ornette Coleman sax doodling, the sidekicks modeled on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the junkie slapstick (fingers that can't find the cigarette in one's mouth), to the pair of beefy narcs who bring the hero downtown, you have to wonder whose '50s are these?