The QB detective

Another of the movies that I watched over the weekend was Tony Rome, off a cheap box set of Frank Sinatra movies I picked up.

Frank Sinatra plays Tony Rome, a detective with a gambling problem who lives on a boat at a marina in lovely Miami. One day, he's called up by his former partner Turpin (Robert Wilke), who tells him that there's a young lady passed out in a hotel, and the management would appreciate if Tony could discreetly return the girl to her parents, since they're rich and neither the hotel nor the parents want any negative publicity.

The girl, Diana Pines (Sue Lyon) is the daughter of construction magnate Rudy Kosterman (Simon Oakland) and has recently married. Dad remarried after Diana's mother died, and his second wife is Rita (Gena Rowlands). Visiting is Ann Archer (Jill St. John), whom you expect to have a fatal attraction on somebody. Dad hires Tony to keep an eye on Diana and see why she's doing things that might bring about bad publicity.

But he's not the only one in the family to hire Tony. Diana discovers that while she was passed out at the hotel, a diamond brooch has gone missing, and she and Rita hire Tony to find out what happened to that pin.

It's fairly obvious that people are being less than honest with him, when you consider that some heavies show up at the boat and rather nonchalantly ask Tony whether they can pistol-whip him or chloroform him so they can ransack his boat in peace to find that diamond. (Tony chooses the chloroform, but he has no idea where the brooch is.) The police get on the case when Turpin is murdered, and Tony is unsurprisingly a person of interest in the killing.

Tony Rome is a serviceable enough movie, but I couldn't help but feel watching it that Sinatra was just going through the motions. It's not that he's bad; it's more that the movie feels like any of a bunch of detective movies from that era. I found Sinatra's performance in The Detective to be much better. Still, for the price of the cheap box set, you can't really go wrong. The movie was also in the proper aspect ratio, and had a bunch of trailers as extras.