The Return of Sergeants Three

In his prime, Frank Sinatra was a pretty powerful guy.

So powerful that, for quite some time, he pulled three of his movies out of TV distribution: "Suddenly" (in which Frank played a psycho gangster assassin out to kill Harry Truman); "The Manchurian Candidate" (in which Frank played a man out to stop an assassination that was just too close to the JFK killing a year later), and "Sergeants Three."

"Suddenly," and "The Manchurian Candidate" were pulled out of sensitivity over the JFK killing.

"Sergeants Three" seems to have been pulled because it eventually became WAAAAYYY politically incorrect: it was a remake of "Gunga Din" in which Sammy Davis Jr. played the servile and childish Din character as an "American Negro" and in which American Indians were substituted for the bloodthirsty Hindu Indian Thuggees of the original.

"Suddenly" and "Manchurian Candidate" eventually were cleared for distribution, years ago. But "Sergeants Three" was left to rot.

Until recently. It has been re-released on DVD. (Its extremely offensive trailer, hosted by Henry Silva as a drunken Indian, has not.)

It is a pretty crucial "Rat Pack Movie."

For there are only really TWO "Rat Pack Movies" in which all five of them appear together: "Ocean's Eleven" (1960) and "Sergeant's Three" (1962.) In those two and only those two, you get Frank, and Dino, and Sammy, and Peter, and Joey.

Peter Lawford would be banished after "Sergeant's Three" for being the messenger that his brother-in-law JFK would not be staying at Frank's Palm Springs house. Joey would just sort of phase out.

There would be one more "Rat Pack Movie" with the Big Three: Frank, Dino, and Sammy in "Robin and the 7 Hoods" (with Bing Crosby added for vocal power and Peter Falk doing a kind of flashier Joey Bishop.) Frank and Dean alone would fake a Rat Pack movie ("4 for Texas" -- you digging all the craps references in these titles?) and make one more bomb (How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life) before ending the Rat Pack mystique for almost good (less a failed 1988 concert tour from which Dino dropped out early.)

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Which brings us back to "Sergeant's Three." Whereas "Ocean's Eleven" and "Robin and the 7 Hoods" have been in perpetual cable channel rotation for many years, "Sergeants Three" has been MIA for around 40 years. It used to play on the NBC-TV Saturday Night Movie in the sixties, but no more.

Seeing it recently, "Sergeant's Three" to me looked like a very peculiar, very strange movie. Hard to explain it, really.

It was directed by John Sturges, in between "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape," so it is a very professional movie, with sweeping wide-screen vistas of the Utah desert and peaks and a surprisingly serious air a lot of the time.

These things were most noticable:

-- The total absence of any singing by the boys (In "Oceans," Dino and Sammy sing, though Frank does not; in "Robin" EVERYBODY sings).

-- A musical credit theme of rather drab, quaint Western seriousness (this from the director of "The Magnificent Seven")

-- But above all, a very strange SLOWNESS and quietude. Scene after scene unfolds a ridiculously leisurely pace, with the men waiting a long time between lines, scenes going on and on and on, and deeply serious stares being exchange between and among our Rat Packers. Its kind of "Ingmar Bergman does Vegas."


"Gunga Din" is followed religiously, scene by scene, but the transplant to the American West doesn't quite play, and key scenes from "Gunga" are poorly restaged by Sturges (perhaps because Sinatra wouldn't cooperate for more studied takes.)

As for the "politically incorrect" material. It is there. But Sammy Davis always had great self-mocking authority, and he manages to keep his Gunga Din ("Jonah") cool beyond his surface servitude. The Indians are generally not played by Indians (two "Ocean's" guys...Henry Silva and tough guy Buddy Lester are among them), and are indeed, straight villains, but...well, Marlon Brando took care of THAT.

If any kudos are worth offering to "Sergeants Three" it would be in the area of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra looking great together in this movie and playing beautifully well off of each other. They are "slumming" here, but each man was a far better actor than they got credit for. From "Gunga Din," Dean Martin's got the Cary Grant part, and Sinatra has the Victor McLaglen part, but the pairing is really more like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart together. Martin plays for the funny, and Sinatra plays for the serious, and it WORKS.

Martin in particular knew his way around a breezy comic attitude. There is one extremely overlong verbal scene between Sinatra and Dino that ends with Dino challening Frank to a fistfight, Frank hitting him in the jaw, and Dino waiting about three seconds to fling himself back from the blow. It's Three Stooges stuff, but it works. Cuz of Dino (in real life, Dino was an ex-boxer who would have cleaned Frank's clock.)

Dino and Frank also rather graciously play a long, long, long scene centered on Junior Rat Packer Joey Bishop, as the two cool guys drink Joey's martinet Army staff officer into a stupor. Its another weird scene, but Joey gets his due.

The particular weirdness of seeing "Sergeants Three" for the first time since my childhood decades ago hasn't quite worn off several days after I did. (I recall seeing it as a child at the theater with my grandfather, who died only about a week later. The movie and the man are joined in my mind. Its the last thing my family really did with him, seeing that movie. He wasn't well, he enjoyed the movie.)

"Sergeant's Three" is a "lost movie" of no real value or power beyond showing us "how it used to be at the movies."

Still, I'm glad I got to see it again, and it is undeniably true: Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin WERE big stars, great to look at in their prime and even better to listen to -- even if they rather egregiously threw their star power away in too many of their movies, together and apart.

P.S. Funny how Dean Martin ended his partnership with Jerry Lewis just in time to begin a more informal one with Frank Sinatra. It began with the fine drama "Some Came Running" -- for which Martin had to campaign to BE in a movie with the bigger-at-the-time Sinatra -- and puttered on through the Rat Pack specials. Still Dean and Frank were a much cooler duo than Dean and Jerry. And Dino is the best thing in all the Rat Pack movies, the coolest, the cutest, the most committed to acting and entertaining.