It Happened in Brooklyn

Aside from the curiosity of seeing an early teaming of future Rat Packer’s Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford, there’s little reason to watch It Happened in Brooklyn.

The plot sees ex-GI Sinatra, English heir Lawford, a janitor played by Jimmy Durante, and a schoolteacher played by Kathryn Grayson work to get a young boy a music scholarship.

As with all of his early films, Sinatra is miscast as a naïve, awkward boy-next-door type that prevents his natural charm from coming through. Further, his character is dull and one-dimensional to the point of annoyance. About the only thing the film gets right is his character’s eventual fate concerning Kathryn Grayson’s character.

Supporting players Peter Lawford and Jimmy Durante don’t fare much better. Both feel about as real as cartoons, and come across just as flat. Worse still is Grayson, who’s operatic, classical voice is an awful counter to Sinatra’s. Their duets are forced and uninspiring, with Grayson typically belting out scales while Sinatra tries to salvage some semblance of rhythm and style.

Topping it all off is the atrocious script, which, for a film that more or less exists to showcase the musical numbers, runs unforgivably long at 104 minutes. Really, that’s about 104 minutes too long, but even Sinatra die-hards will be reaching for the fast-forward button by the half-hour point.

To that end, It Happened in Brooklyn is a hard film to recommend, even to the biggest of Sinatra fans, as I suspect this is one Ole Blue Eyes himself would like to forget.