Customer Reviews

The Frank Sinatra Show with Ella Fitzgerald

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Five stars for the show itself--Sinatra & Fitzgerald are great, even Peter Lawford's tolerable, and it's amazing that they pulled this thing together in a short time after getting rained out. But don't believe for a second that this was remastered from the original tape, or even remastered. Instead, it was taken from a somewhat dirty kinescope, transferred to what looks like a beat-up 3/4" cassette master. Which is all the more tragic since the original 2" tape master exists, a rarity in this period (see "Sinatra Duets" for clips from the show in this format, looking and sounding great. So for the non-technically minded, in a nutshell: you'll enjoy the content, but the box copy is basically a lie.

This is a great DVD. It shows the momentum and hilarity of an odd-ball snow storm in the Palm Springs Desert during a live Frank Sinatra show. The players all go-with-it... which makes it even more amusing to watch. Ella is just dynamite. She is the fire going off in the snow storm.

Ella is technically and artistically perfect in "There's a Lull in My Life." She makes a difficult and brilliant execution look easy. I must have replayed it 20 times! Ol Blue Eyes is his old charming self and poignantly sings Rainy Day. The Timex commercials are interesting and fun to watch, which describes the rest of the show as well, albeit there are no other jaw-dropping performances besides There's a Lull..."

After the first several minutes I was prepared to call off the show--the audio is, at best, "limited" and the clarity of the video is, frankly, quite wretched. But soon none of these mere technicalities mattered in comparison to the experience of reliving a "live" event. Many serious collectors would agree that the century's most distinguished musical pairing of Sinatra and Riddle never sounded better together (for evidence, simply pick up any of 20 or more of their Capitol "Concept Albums" from the 1950s), and the addition of the Hi Los plus the First Lady of Song (she starts out with Harold Arlen's "There's a Lull in My Life" and later puts on a demonstration of scat singing at its best) ensures that, out of the hundreds of thousands of hours of television programming, this is one of the few that might be considered essential. Sinatra himself swings up a storm (backed by a jazz combo led by Red Norvo) and matches Ella's Arlen ballad with a richly nuanced reading of Van Heusen's classic ballad "Here's That Rainy Day." But the highlight is without a doubt Frank and Ella dueting on "Can't We Be Friends" (with Ella impersonating Pearl Bailey, Dinah Washington, and Della Reese).

It's practically taken as a "given" that television was not Sinatra's medium--he just didn't have the "comfortable" look of Bing or Perry or the ability to wear a fuzzy wool cardigan But Sinatra's "edginess," while proving too big for the small screen, worked well on these Timex specials, bringing significance to the hour. And the producers of the show have to be given high marks for their creative use of "space"--employing the full depth as well as width of the stage while getting even Hermione Gingold (along with Juliette Prowse) in on the dancing.

And not to be missed is the moment when Ole Blue looks directly at the camera and speaks to--Cole Porter! He emphasizes the composer's greatness and acknowledges the songwriter's ill-health, before wishing him a full recovery (if only that had been possible).

Fifty years later and the viewer's alternatives to a network television show like this are too numerous to count. By why bother looking? None of them is likely to include anything remotely as good as this.

This is a great show, For my money nothing is better than Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. This is a must have.