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Ahead of time
By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard 

There is a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt who won’t remove his hat, even in the bathtub, because he wants to look like Dean Martin in this 1958 Vincente Minnelli drama.

It’s about a GI (Frank Sinatra) returning from World War II to a small town where festering hypocrisy reigns supreme.

The French love the film. Others may find it melodramatic and overblown. One thing is sure, however: both Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, as his blowsy girlfriend, are good, and Minnelli was surely in advance of his time decrying the often poisonous respectability of small-town America.