With Pals Like Him, Who Needs Enemies?

While he presented the highlights of Ernest Borgnine’s career, for which the 94 year-old was being honoured with a lifetime achievement award from SAG, Tim Conway, that no-talent hack who thinks pretending to be short ranks as a pinnacle of physical comedy, slobbered all over his former cast member’s accomplishments, including Borgnine’s turn to work with Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. No shit, I almost went through the screen after the weasel to shake the idiocy from his mouth for overlooking Montgomery Clift—a true star—for a former mob flunky. Frank Sinatra is for me one of those actors inextricable with their real life persona. Ava Gardner may have loved the dude, but to me he’ll always be the man who left his child bride Mia Farrow sleeping at casino tables as he yukked it up with buddies playing cards and swilling hooch. When Sinatra plays vulnerable in films such as FHTE or The Manchurian Candidate, I can appreciate him as an artist, and restrain my fingernails from tearing palm flesh. Yet in his Rat Pack visage on display in Guys and Dolls or Pal Joey, I marvel at any woman able to look him in the face without hocking one up. Not even the regal goddess Rita Hayworth could keep me from shutting off Pal Joey after the knuckle walker, woman-hater, dog-abuser finally seduces Hayworth's character and leaves her the morning after in a full-on glow as a younger Gilda onscreen. His character Joey employs the creepshow pick up tactics such as ‘The Neg’ as a method to win over the women played by Hayworth and Kim Novak. He pretends not to remember names, trades sexual innuendo, stalks them, insults them and maintains that in order to win one over, you treat a dame like a lady and a lady like a dame.
Awful.
Joey also thinks coffee and bagels are fit feed for a dog, as well as a chicken leg.
Oh, and he ‘outs’ Hayworth’s society lady as a former stripper at a fundraiser in her own home. She’s all class in the number regardless of his attempt at humiliation. Watch ‘Zip’ and skip Sinatra’s thug performance.