Lady in Cement

I've got a Frank Sinatra box set that has a couple of movies I still haven't gotten around to blogging about. So recently, I put in the DVD of Lady in Cement to do a post on here.

Frank Sinatra plays Tony Rome, the former Miami police detctive turned privated detective whom we already saw in the movie Tony Rome, which I believe is also currently in the FXM rotation. Tony lives on his boat and plays the horses between cases, as well as trying to make money in other ways. This time, for example, he's looking for possible treasure from some old Spanish shipwrecks. However, he doesn't find any Spanish treasure. Instead, he finds a naked blonde whose feet have been put in a cement block and the block dumped into the ocean. Worse, there are sharks nearby.

Tony does the right thing by calling the police, since he used to work for them after all, and still has a good friend on the force in the form of Lt. Santini (Richard Conte). Unfortunately, the police can't get an identification from fingerprints or anything, while Tony doesn't recognize any of the photos in the police library. So who could this woman be, and why would anybody want to kill her? It's fairly obvious that Tony is going to be drawn further into the case.

That comes in the form of a phone message giving him an address to go to. That address is the house of two young women rooming together, Sandra Lomax and Maria Baretto (Lainie Kazan in an early role). But neither of them is the one who called Tony to come to the house. That honor goes to Waldo Gronsky (Dan Blocker), who informs Tony that Sandra has gone missing, and he'd like Tony to find her. There will be some good money in it, too.

Apparently, both Sandra and Maria both worked at a place called Jilly's, a go-go bar where they both danced in skimpy outfits under the employ of an obviously gay man who has hired his lover as a bouncer, a characterization which really only serves as the basis for some uncomfortable humor and testing the new boundaries in film. Maria doesn't know where Sandra is, but suggests that Sandra attended a party hosted by Kit Forrest (Raquel Welch), a widowed heiress with a lot of money to her name.

Tony goes to see Kit, and she gives him no information, instead calling on "reformed" gambler Al Mungar (Martin Gable) to get Tony out of there. However, it turns out that Kit was expecting somebody else that she'd need Mungar to get rid of, not a private detective. When she realizes what happened, she's slightly less reluctant about helping Tony.

But this is a twisted case, and there are more murders, with one of them even pinned on Tony, who is clearly being framed, so he's going to have to evade Santini while trying to find out where Sandra is and who is the titular Lady in Cement.

Tony Rome was apparently not a hit according to Wikipedia, and yet still a sequel was made. I'm guessing that had something to do with Sinatra working in Miami at the time and being able to make the movie by day and do his nightclub act in the evenings. Unfortunately, the movie was saddled with a poor script that doesn't quite make enough sense. The Miami locations, however, are lovely to look at. Thankfully, Lady in Cement is part of a box set, so at that price it's not too much of a disappointment. I don't think I'd pay standalone DVD prices for it, however.