Synopsis
A former novelist returns to his small Midwest town after serving in the Army during WWII, to the chagrin of his social-climbing brother, and becomes close with an easy-going professional gambler and torn between two very different women.
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Cast
- Frank SinatraDave Hirsh
- Dean MartinBama Dillert
- Shirley MacLaineGinnie Moorehead
- Martha HyerGwen French
- Arthur KennedyFrank Hirsh
- Nancy GatesEdith Barclay
- Leora DanaAgnes Hirsh
- Betty Lou KeimDawn Hirsh
- Larry GatesProfessor Robert Haven French
- Steve PeckRaymond Lanchak
Recommendations
- 100
Time Out
Wonderful stuff. - 80
The Observer (UK)
A quite brilliant look at the hypocrisy and conformity of small-town life in the Midwest and those who challenge it. - 80
TV Guide Magazine
This film captures the disillusionment of returning WWII vets, and brilliantly addresses itself to many of the director's characteristic concerns--masculine fear of domestication and attendant resentment of women; the tensions of masculine friendship; women's complicity in their own oppression; the compromises demanded of artists functioning under capitalism. - 78
Austin Chronicle
The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City. - 75
LarsenOnFilm
If Some Came Running survives its dated gender politics, that’s all due to MacLaine. Her Ginnie—overly made up and yet disheveled, with hamburger bun crumbs on her sparkly cocktail dress—is the only one to lend the movie an authentic sense of dignity. - 70
Variety
The story is pure melodrama, despite the intention of the original novel’s author, James Jones, to invest it with greater stature. But the integrity with which the film is handled by all its contributors lifts it at times to tragedy. - 70
Los Angeles Times
A rambling fat memoir about a soldier returning home to a Midwestern city, where his roughhouse, bravura ways tear the delicate social fabric apart, has lots of sleazy, low-life glamour on the screen. Scenarist John Patrick and director Vincente Minnelli made it work in this memorable 1959 film. - 50
The New York Times
It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.
