Tony Rome

Tony Rome is the best thing Frank Sinatra has ruined since Mia Farrow. As in her case, though, it isn't all Sinatra's doing. Richard Conte, Jill St. John, Simon Oakland and Gena Rowlands, among the cast, plus screenwriter Richard Breen and director Gordon Douglas, have given Rome their all.

The state of the American detective picture is on trial when every time Tony Rome opens a door, there's either a corpse, a gunman, or a naked girl situated vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. True, the state of the American detective picture is low, but not that low. Tony Rome is the most synthetically slick movie since Goldfinger, and affords a point-by-point lesson in how to write dialogue that is neither credible nor cool.

"Rome here," says Sinatra when he answers the phone. "Are you still going with that Cuban girl?" an old friend asks. "No," says Sinatra, "she left me with a 40-dollar perfume bill. If I'd known she was gonna smell that good, I woulda hung right in there." Actually one of the movie's best lines.

Screenwriter Richard Breen establishes his nowness with lines like "That's one thing you can't blame on Lyndon Johnson" (Sinatra to Oakland, whose jewels have been stolen) and "You interested in acid, pot or banana peels?" (a character called Fat Candy who's a prostitute).

What makes the screenplay really inferior is not its dialogue but its structure. To Breen's credit, he has spared no violence and omitted no possible crime; but the script completely lacks a sense of pacing (a lack that is suitably reinforced by director Douglas, and finalized in the cutting room). Following Sinatra's fast, complicated search for villains becomes practically impossible, because the leads from one day's work to the next are always contained in inaudible, or highly forgettable, bits of dialogue.

Sinatra himself simply can't carry the picture. His line readings are consistently weak, and if occasionally they seem almost adequate, it is only by comparison with Jill St. John's never-ceasing monotone.