Frank Sinatra

After Bing Crosby, no jazz vocalist had more success in the movies, or was better at intertwining his performances with his films, than Frank Sinatra. From 1940 to 1970, he was never far from Hollywood, and his film successes often went hand in hand with his popular fortune. (Even his movie personas aligned with his musical themes and ambitions, from his breakthrough starring role, in Higher and Higher, to the ambitious On the Town, the scrapping From Here to Eternity, the quintessentially swinging Pal Joey, and the self-satisfied Ocean's Eleven.) Sinatra at the Movies isn't the career-spanning movie retrospective that it should be -- instead, it concentrates on his Capitol period of the '50s. (Even his big film hit from 1943's Higher and Higher, "I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night," is present here only in its 1957 version.) The '50s are virtually defined by Sinatra's great music, but the quality of his movie titles was scattershot. There were some big hits from the film world -- "Three Coins in the Fountain," "All the Way," "(Love Is) The Tender Trap," "All of Me" -- and virtually all of them were great performances. Sinatra was also making sure he recorded plenty of great material, classics like "I Could Write a Book" (from Pal Joey), "The Lady Is a Tramp" (Pal Joey again), and "Just One of Those Things" (Young at Heart). Yet he was occasionally becoming lighter and more pithy by the end of his Capitol era, never more so than when a children's choir began "High Hopes." Overall, it's not a great choice for beginners, although it provides a good complement to his studio albums of the '50s. An added bonus here is the inclusion of several songs that are comparatively rare on Sinatra retrospectives: "Not as a Stranger," "Monique," and "C'est Magnifique." ~ John Bush, All Music Guide