Tony Rome attempts to blend the cold calculations of classic film noir with the cool, hip 1960s thriller, but is unsuccessful at both. It isn’t a bad film, but it lacks a certain something. It doesn’t pop like it needs to.
The script (based on a novel by Marvin Albert and written by Richard L. Breen) is wonderfully twisty and convoluted, but it fails at creating the sort of witty, cynical dialogue Raymond Chandler was so good at writing and Humphrey Bogart was great at saying. Frank Sinatra was a great singer and a decent actor, and he was the epitome of cool, but he struggles to make Tony Rome interesting, and surprisingly fails at making him hip. He was in his fifties at the time, and this was the late sixties, so I suppose his hep factor had waned.
The film struggles with it as well. The opening titles find Tony Rome sailing about Miami Beach in his houseboat while Nancy Sinatra sings the title song. Sinatra looks goofy wearing a sailor’s hat. He docks, gets out, and notices a pretty woman wearing a bikini. The camera crash zooms in on her derriere, then immediately cuts to the bottom of a young male boxer.
It is an interesting cut, a fun nod to the casual sexism of these types of films. The camera all too quickly moves away from the boxer, which is either an even more interesting recognition of sexism (zooming in on a woman’s bottom is sexy, but staring at a man’s arse is gross and must be moved away from post haste) or I’m reading way too much into this very brief moment.
Tony Rome is a former cop turned struggling private investigator. He’s hired by his former partner, whom he hates, and is now working as a hotel detective, to take a drunken, passed-out woman currently sleeping it off in one of the hotel’s rooms, home.
The woman is Diana Pines (Sue Lyon), the daughter of a rich, powerful construction magnate, and it wouldn’t do the hotel any good to have her discovered in her condition on its premises.
Rome agrees, but when he arrives, he’s tasked by the father to find out where she has been and why she’s been acting so strangely lately. Before he can even walk out of the house, he’s hired by Diana’s step-mom to leave out some of the gory details when he reports to the dad.
When he gets to the houseboat, he finds two thugs tearing up the place. They are looking for a pin. When Tony informs them he doesn’t know what they are talking about, they courteously ask him whether he’d like to be knocked out with a gun whacked to the back of the head or via some chloroform.
When he awakens, he finds Diana looking over him. She also asks him about a pin, thinking he stole it before he took her home. The pin is a diamond-studded piece of jewelry, and it’s gone missing. Diana hires Rome to find it for her.
All of that happens in the first ten minutes. A whole lot more occurs over the next 90 minutes or so before the film concludes. I’d explain it to you, but I had a hard time following it all. He gets help from and romances Ann Archer (Jill St. John), and is antagonized by Lt. Santini (Richard Conte), while a surprisingly large number of bodies pile up. I enjoyed the mystery even though I’m not sure it made all that much sense.
It is an enjoyable enough film that I’m willing to check out its sequel, Lady in Cement. even while wishing it had been a little smarter, hipper, and tightly constructed.
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