In my review of Tony Rome (1967), I noted that it wasn’t a bad film, but that it lacked a certain something, that it didn’t “pop.” The thing is, it was so close to being a very good film. With a few changes, it could have been brilliant. It was close enough that I decided to watch the sequel, Lady in Cement, in hopes that the filmmaker would make the proper corrections and turn the story into something wonderful.
Sometimes, even the smartest people are wrong. Lady in Cement does make some changes—all the wrong ones. In my opinion, Tony Rome needed a sharper script, some tighter one-liners, and an endlessly cool lead. What Lady in Cement does is lean into the more sexist and homophobic tropes, make the jokes much broader and, therefore, lame, and allow Frank Sinatra to be even less interesting and cool than before.
It starts out strong. Tony Rome is looking for some Spanish gold that was lost at sea in the 1500s and instead stumbles across a dead woman at the bottom of the ocean, her feet encased in concrete. (I do always wonder about these situations – did they force the woman to stand in wet concrete for hours until it dried, or did they kill her first and then someone stood her up until it dried?)
He reports the incident to our friendly neighborhood detective, Santini (Richard Conte), and carries on with his life. That doesn’t last long as a big old brute named Waldo Gronsky (Dan Blocker) hires Rome to find a lady named Sondra Lomax. Naturally, this case connects to the dead lady with cement shoes.
Raquel Welch makes an appearance as a lady who threw a party that Sondra Lomax attended. She’s connected to some gangster who gives our hero trouble. There’s a lot of shoe leather questioning at local hotspots and more than a lot of dumb gay jokes. The 1960s were a curious time in cinema as gay people were suddenly allowed to exist but they usually wind up just being stereotypes and the butt of dumb jokes.
None of the story is all that interesting, and the filmmaking doesn’t perk it up any. I’ve decided that Sinatra, who was in his 50s at the time, just doesn’t have that cool factor at that point to make his Tony Rome <ahem> sing. I love the guy, but he just doesn’t work for me in these films.
What we’re left with is a movie that could have been a lot of fun to watch but winds up being kind of a bore.
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