Okay, I admit it. I can’t resist Frank Sinatra as private eye Tony Rome. He made two movies about the Miami-based private eye, TONY ROME and THE LADY IN CEMENT, and I love them both. They are based on books by Marvin Albert and owe, at least in the film versions, a large debt to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. Rome is an ex-cop who lives on a boat and barely scrapes out a living. I find it impossible to channel surf past either movie, even though I’ve seen them both a hundred times. The stories aren’t all that well-plotted, but there’s something about that Rat Pack take on the hard-boiled detective that I find irresistable. Now Hugo Montenegro’s soundtrack to LADY IN CEMENT is out on CD. I bought it as fast as I could click. Like I said, it’s an addiction. I’m even easy prey for Sinatra’s other cop movies — THE DETECTIVE, CONTRACT ON CHERRY STREET, and the awful SEVEN DEADLY SINS. Is there any hope for me?
PS – They tried to turn TONY ROME into a TV series. Twentieth Century Fox did a short demo film/pilot that never aired called NICK QUARRY. Jerry Goldsmith did the music, which is terrific and has been released as bonus material on his STRIPPER soundtrack CD.
A sample of the NICK QUARRY theme is posted on the BuySoundtrax site, but you can listen to it here:
I’ll always remember Marvin Albert as a pretty cool writer because in one of the Tony Rome books Tony witnesses a killing in a hell-hole of a neighborhood and has to get to a phone. He tries three or four bars (my recollection) but they have no phones. No phones! Why the hell not? Tony asks. Because, the bartender tells him, the losers who drink here get on the phone with their girl friends and wives and get so pissed off they rip the phones out of the wall–and now the phone company would install replacements. Now that is a tough neighborhood. I don’t suppose Marvin Albert was a great writer of any kind but he was always slick and fun. And a couple times a lot better than that.
I loved his FIRST DEADLY SIN with Faye Dunaway as his dying wife.
Marvin Albert may not have been a great writer, but he was a good one. He not only wrote a couple of books as “Tony Rome,” but he also wrote a series as “Nick Quarry.” Those books are at least as entertaining as the Tony Rome novels. Maybe the TV series was based on them instead of the Rome books and movies. Except that Nick Quarry was the author, not the character. The narrator of the Quarry books was a p.i. named Jake Barrow. What a tangled web this is!
The pilot, directed by Walter Grauman, was made in 1968 for ABC but was deemed too violent for television. It was written by Albert and used footage from the two TONY ROME movies. It starred Tony Scotti as Nick Quarry who was, as you point out, another Marvin Albert creation of sorts (To get even more complicated, Albert also wrote under the name Anthony Rome). My understanding was they didn’t use the Tony Rome name so they could leave the door open for more movies in the franchise
Lee, I share your fondness for Tony Rome. And I apparently have more faith in Marvin Albert’s originality. The Rome books were published at the start of the Sixties. Tony had been sucking down Budwisers aboard the yacht/houseboat he won in a card game for three or four years before Travis McGee even sat down to play cards for the Busted Flush.
Thanks so much for the correction! I had no idea the Tony Rome novels came first. Shows you what I know…
Always been a fan of the Tony Rome movies, too. Not so big on Albert as a writer, but you can’t go too wrong with a cool character like Rome. Just picked up all three books, two of them in original Dell format. McGee was always too laconic for me. Rome is cut from a different bolt. He’s a tough guy. A bit cliched, but that’s what makes it fun. And Albert does give a nice glimpse at a transitional era in American society.