https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/9e575687-b218-4950-a977-301c116ec045 The Rat Pack Captured (1965), English, Directors: Al De Caprio, Robert Finkelstein, Featuring: Count Basie Orchestra, Johnny Carson, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones Content Warnings: (none listed) questionble racial language, History: The year is 1965; the event, billed as a “Frank Sinatra Spectacular” and broadcast on closed circuit to theaters across the country, is a benefit for Father Dismas Clark’s Half-Way House for excons. Sinatra said, “Be there,” and they were there—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Trini Lopez, Kaye Stevens, and an amalgamation of two different bands, including members of the Count Basie Orchestra, conducted by a lean cat named Quincy Jones. Johnny Carson was only three years into his tenure as host of The Tonight Show. A recently discovered kinescope of this bash—under the new title, The edited 90-minute version of the benefit—featuring Frank, Dino, Sammy, and Johnny—represents the only known full-length video of the Rat Pack in performance. (A two-volume compact disc exists of the Rat Pack performing at the Villa Venice club in Chicago in 1962—a gig they were strong-armed into doing by the mobster Sam Giancana.) The Rat Pack kine-scope, found in a closet at the Dismas House, is more than a historical curio. It has the glamorous wham of a championship prizefight. It’s an opportunity to catch three of America’s greatest showmen in their tigerish prime (with Carson along for the ride), before they became total legends and turned into leather. There’s Dean Martin with his sleepy power, like a leopard in a smoking jacket, finishing his few songs with the words “I’d like to do some more for ya, but I’m lucky I remembered these.” There’s Sammy Davis Jr., a gleaming revolver of a man, belting out a maudlin Anthony Newley torch song as if he means it, goofing around with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (“it’s a little lumpy, but you’re under my skin”), demonstrating the latest go-go dances (the monkey, the jerk, the frug, the mashed potato), and, in a final tour de force, doing quick carbon copies of Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, and Dean himself. And then there’s Sinatra, confident, not the Adam’s apple on a stick he was or the barrel-chested belter he would become, cruising inside the luxury-limousine sound of the Count Basie band, not so much singing the up-tempo numbers (“Fly Me to the Moon,” “You Make Me Feel So Young”) as riding them home, his rabbit jabs providing the punctuation to his cagey phrasing and eased-off vowels. Frank Sinatra has been called great for so long that it’s easy to forget how great he is. Praise becomes platitude. At one point, alluding to Sammy’s set, he says that the song he’s about to perform makes for “a slight duplication here, but I don’t think you’ll mind too much,” launching into his own rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which he contours and tattoos as if romancing for the first time. Dean amuses, Sammy is mahvelous, but only Sinatra, with his Manhattan-skyline voice, conjures a mood and a spell. The racial ribbing, though not as crass or persistent as the kidding on the Villa Venice CD, conveys the edginess of the civil-rights era. Sammy mentions something about getting Martin Luther King Jr.’s permission to appear. Dean lifts Sammy in his arms and says, “I’d like to thank the N.A.A.C.P. for this wonderful trophy.” Sammy, who had converted to Judaism, is hailed as the only Jewish Muslim: Irving X. What’s interesting about the last segment, aside from the forced joviality of the racial horseplay, is Carson’s surfacing irritation as the buffoonery (deliberately bad imitations of Jimmy Cagney, etc.) drags on too long. He feels extraneous on the stage, checking his watch and saying he has to catch a plane, and although he is not nearly the star at that point that Frank, Dino, or Sammy is, he isn’t grateful to play stooge to the gods. We see in his broomstick posture and sentry eyes the isolated power that Carson would become. The show ends with all four wailing away at “The Birth of the Blues,” with Dean taking a brilliantly timed pratfall just as he wings into his verse. The excitement that this kinescope has sparked testifies to the unfading legend of the Rat Pack and their streamlined influence on male bravado, which can be observed in everything from the resurgence of “bachelor pad” music and the cocktail hour to the nostalgia for the Vegas of yore in movies like Casino and Bugsy, when the city still swung and the red lobbies weren’t clogged with Mr. and Mrs. Big-Butt America pushing strollers between the slots. The Rat Pack is the Mount Rushmore of men having fun. The term “Rat Pack” originally designated not Sinatra and his flying wedge but an informal Hollywood social set revolving around Humphrey Bogart and his pals. Nathaniel Benchley designed the letterhead of the group’s stationery, which bore the loyalty oath coined by Bogart, “Never rat on a rat.” Sinatra, who idolized Bogart, was a member in good standing, along with Judy Garland and agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. After Bogart’s death in 1957, Sinatra, with his natural charisma and inability to be alone (see Gay Talese’s classic study in Esquire in 1966, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”), filled the social void and then some with his own Rat Pack, also known as the Clan—names Sinatra disavowed as inaccurate and uncouth. “There is no such thing as a clan or pack,” he explained. “It’s just a bunch of millionaires with common interests who get together to have a little fun.” The members of this floating bacchanal included Martin (with whom Sinatra co-starred in Some Came Running), Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford, classy dames like Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine, and supporting players like Sammy Cahn, Cesar Romero, Don Rickles, Milton Berle, and the director Lewis Milestone. The Rat Pack formed during the same period that the Beats rolled onto the scene—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and all those other spontaneous bopsters. (Kerouac’s On the Road was published in 1957, the year Bogart’s Rat Pack gave way to Sinatra’s.) At first the two outfits couldn’t seem more bizarro-world apart, the Rat Packers showing the money in their sharkskin suits and slick grooming, the Beats bumming around in fleapit pads from Monterey to Morocco on the path to Buddha-hood. Yet both were a reaction to the suburban conformism of work-home-family in the Eisenhower era. The Rat Pack, like the Beats, disdained middle-class moderation in their pursuit of free-wheeling kicks. (“This [cigarette] ain’t got no printin’ on it at all,” Dean Martin muses in the Rat Pack video.) Like the Beats and their fictional alter egos, the Rat Pack were always in motion, nocturnal creatures partying in a perpetual Now. And like the Beats, the Rat Pack had their own special hipster lingo to winnow out the squares from the truly anointed, a code that sounds like something cooked up by Steve Allen in a jazzy frame of mind. Kitty Kelley provides a glossary in her 1986 biography of Sinatra, His Way: women were “broads,” “bird” equaled penis (as in “How’s your bird?”), “a little hey-hey” meant a good time, “clyde” was an all-purpose noun, and death was “the big casino.” Personal hygiene aside, where the Rat Pack and the Beats parted company was in their attitudes toward power in all its seductive guises. To the Beats—self-educated in the prophecies of William Blake and Eastern notions of nonattachment—the Pentagon, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood were all manifestations of Moloch. “Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity / Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God,” Allen Ginsberg declared. (And this was before Pauly Shore.) While the Beats were content to woo nodding fields of young minds, the Rat Pack enjoyed the view from the penthouse suite, where sex and money were plugged into the same socket. With Sinatra as their king, their Pope, il padrone, the Rat Pack were a royal court, granting and receiving favor. Seas of gawkers parted in hushed wonder when they crossed the lobby of Las Vegas’s Sands Hotel, the casino which is the Xanadu of Rat Pack lore. The Sands was where they did their most famous engagements (the double live album Sinatra at the Sands, available on CD, preserves the brassy ebullience), drawing the high rollers and their minked molls. Nick Tosches sets the scene in his 1992 Dean Martin biography, Dino: It was not just the dirty-rich giovanostri and padroni who were drawn to them, to their glamour, to the appeal of darkness made respectable. The world was full, it seemed, of would-be wops and woplings who lived vicariously through them, to whom the imitation of cool took on the religiosity of the Renaissance ideal of imitatio Christi. The very songs that Sinatra and Dean sang, the very images they projected, inspired lavish squandering among the countless men who would be them. It was the Jew-roll around the prick that rendered them ithyphallic godkins, simulacra of the great ones, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the teased-hair lobster-slurping Bimbo sapiens they sought to impress. Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:57:33 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tankie.tube https://tankie.tube/lazy-static/avatars/3ba3ff73-a8b6-49c9-add8-9653ef090c7f.webp https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/9e575687-b218-4950-a977-301c116ec045 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.