AllMovie

Inhibited by its era from playing out the messy relationships of James Jones' novel in all their explicitness, director Vincente Minnelli finds a means of using this to his advantage in Some Came Running, constructing an unsettling melodrama of suggestion and understatement. Minnelli presents a post-war American Anytown that keeps its inhabitants' desires in check through a policy of mutual assured destruction. Even though he rarely acts directly, returning native son Frank Sinatra's arrival upsets the delicate balance of those around him, reminding brother Arthur Kennedy of his lost passion, catalyzing new buddy Dean Martin's destructive tendencies, and encouraging the self-sacrificing habits of girlfriend Shirley MacLaine. A film that only makes sense in widescreen, Minnelli skillfully composes his frames to illustrate the space between his subjects. There's as much drama made of two people traversing the distance between them as some films derive from gunfights. Working against expectations of tidy resolutions and happy endings, its sympathetic but destructive characters demand the loose ends of its conclusion.