When most people think of Frank Sinatra, Las Vegas comes to mind—the glory days of the Rat Pack, the Sands Hotel, the original Ocean’s 11. But, with all the attention focused on Old Blue Eyes recently, including Sinatra month on TCM and a new postal stamp issued in his honor, I am reminded of another city that Frank had in the palm of his hand—Miami, Florida.              

      Sinatra made a handful of films that were at least partially shot in Miami, including A Hole in the Head, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Though none of them have the hip cache of Ocean’s 11, each film showcased parts of Miami in a nice blend of material and milieu. The hotel that Sinatra’s can’t-catch-a-break character ran in A Hole in the Head was the little Art Deco gem called the Cardozo along South Beach, an area that at the time had run its course as a vacation escape for East Coast families. Eight years later, his cool-as-ice detective Tony Rome prowled a seedier South Beach, which had become lost in the shadows of the big building boom of the 1950s. Tony Rome has not aged well, and it is not a film considered among Sinatra’s best, but I have fond memories of watching it with my best friend one lonely Thanksgiving in an almost empty theater in Ohio.  It made me want to marry a Miami millionaire, like one of the characters in the film, and get out of the little steel town that I was stuck in. 

           Back in the day, Sinatra was a fixture at the Fontainebleau, a luxury hotel that had opened in 1954 on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Designed by New York architect Morris Lapidus in a style known as Miami Modern (or, MiMo), the Fontainebleau represented the opulence and prosperity of the 1950s. Th

Not surprisingly, the Bloo makes a cameo appearance in more than one Sinatra film. In A Hole in the Head, his character pitches an idea for a major family-style amusement park in Florida (imagine that!) while poolside at the Fontainebleau. In Tony Rome, one of the film’s many gold-digging women stays at the Bloo. But, more to the point, there was a lot of Sinatra in some of his characters, particularly Tony Rome, and it seems fitting that his old friends (Richard Conte, Rocky Graziano, Michael Romanoff) and his old haunts (the Bloo, the Double Deck Turf Club) should also appear in his films. By extension, the locations then become cool—in the hip sense of the word—like Sinatra himself.

Jerry Lewis also played the nightclub at the Fontainebleau, and he also used the hotel in the first film that he directed, The Bellboy. The Bloo may have made a wink-wink cameo in Sinatra’s Miami films, but it was virtually Lewis’s costar in The Bellboy, in which he played the title character whose name was Stanley (an homage to his idol, Stan Laurel).  All of the hotel’s trademark components were used in the film, from the famous curved front to the black bow-tie marble pattern in the floor of the main lobby. Several comic bits feature characters pulling up to the front of the hotel, including the one in which Lewis, who plays himself as a spoiled celebrity for this sequence, arrives with a huge entourage. One by one, the whole group pours out of a single vehicle until the joke reveals itself–obviously, they could not have all fit. In 1960, when the film was released, the hotel’s long, curved entrance looked sleek and ultra-modern, giving it the connotation of the perfect destination for the type of Hollywood movie star Lewis was spoofing.

            One of the distinctive details of the hotel’s interior was the “stairway to nowhere.” Lapidus liked to declare he had designed the hotel for those who had struck it big and wanted to show off, and the stairway to nowhere was an example of that. At the top of the stairs was a small mezzanine where the elevators stopped. In the evenings, couples would descend on the elevators to the mezzanine, where the women would get off while the men continued to the lobby. The men waited at the bottom of the staircase while their elegantly dressed partners would walk down the stairs to the delight of their admirers. In The Bellboy, Stanley encounters an odd stranger on the stairway. The stranger, played by Larry Best, pantomimes the act of eating an apple while providing an elaborate crunching sound effect. Though incredulous at first, Stanley is eventually caught up in the man’s enthusiasm for his tasty treat and takes a bite of the nonexistent apple himself.

            A couple of comic bits are staged in the hotel’s dining areas. In the first, Stanley takes a break for lunch, but the famous 3000-seat main dining room is packed with guests and tourists. Stanley spots the very long counter, where, fortunately, every stool is empty. The camera tracks with him as he walks to the nearby buffet to grab a quick lunch; when he turns back to the counter a split second later, it is completely filled with noisy, hungry customers, leaving Stanley perplexed and without a seat. Later in the film, Stanley takes another lunch break, this time at the far end of the Poodle Lounge, where a window looks into the pool–not onto the pool but into the pool. The Fontainebleau’s huge pool, which was 60 feet by 120 feet, had windows at either end below the water line so guests in the lobby or in the lounge could watch the swimmers. For poor Stanley, however, the roles are reversed as the swimmers gather round the window and relentlessly stare at the poor diner, intimidating him. The pay-off of the joke is when a swimmer who looks remarkably like Stan Laurel walks along the bottom of the pool and tips his hat to Stanley. The Laurel look-alike is actually a running joke in the film, continually popping up to pester poor Stanley.

            The Bloo underwent major renovations a few years ago, and perhaps some of its trademark MiMo details are now gone, but The Bellboy contains so many architectural details that it serves as a “snapshot” of the Florida landmark from another era.

             Movie locations tend to be taken for granted as mere backdrops for the story, or they are exploited for their visual splendor or unique atmosphere. But, they can also be much more, and in recent years, I have become interested in the meaning that a film’s location can bring to the narrative. A location can underscore the star’s persona (as with Sinatra) or become a “character” in the story (as with The Bellboy), or a film can be seen as a historical reference to learn about the location as it was in a bygone era. All of this can add a different dimension to a film for further appreciation.