This is not The Man with the Golden Gun. I think in the back of my brain I thought that’s what I was booking, a James Bond film.

This is part of the Kim Novak retrospective at this year‘s Melbourne Film Festival which made me aware that really all I know Novak from is Vertigo. She plays such a cold character in that film that I think it has affected my perception of her.

This black-and-white classic from 1955 and directed by Otto Preminger has Frank Sinatra as the star, although it is Novak’s character of Molly that will stay with you. Sinatra is Frankie Machine, freshly released from six months in prison where he served a sentence for dealing – illegal gambling I think, rather than drugs, although it is clear that drugs are his weakness. Six months has helped him get clean from heroin and he returns with a new and optimistic view of life. He has been told he has potential as a drummer and that becomes his dream. This is the first of the metaphors for his golden arm, something that is played on as he deals at a poker game and rolls up his sleeve for a hit.

A doctor at the prison has told him that, if he wants to stay clean, he needs to not go back to his old life of dealing. Rather frustrating for us as an audience, he is able to stick with this for about a day before the other troubles in his life,see him heading back to the door of odious charmer Louis (Darren McGavin), his actual dealer.

The complication in his life is his wife Zosh (Eleanor Parker), who lives in an attic apartment and uses a wheelchair. She is that sort of female character in the 50s who is needy and clingy and regularly overcome with the vapours. She wants to squash Frankie’s ambition to change his life, suspecting that to be clean and creatively occupied might mean she can’t keep hold of him.

Molly (Novak) is Frankie‘s downstairs neighbour and it is clear that she has been his mistress for awhile. It is not something that either of them feel they should continue, although we can see clearly that Molly will be good for him whereas Zosh will just pull him back down.

There’s a certain amount of frustration watching Frankie continually blow his chances. Sinatra does a good job, leaning into the melodrama that at the time must’ve seemed gritty and shocking. Watching him go through withdrawals with our 21st-century viewpoint seems rather hammy and comical but gladly, the audience didn’t laugh, realising the gravity of what we were being shown.

There was a moment right at the very end where I thought perhaps it was going to turn out really bad. When you watch it, it’s the moment where you think that Zosh‘s fiction might’ve become a reality. But this is Hollywood in the 50s and so we are given an ending that we can live with.