Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra), a dissolute writer just discharged from the Army, gets stuck in his Midwest childhood home, where he battles the suffocating boosterism of his older brother Frank and has to choose between a chilly schoolteacher who spends her nights grading papers and a waifish factory girl (Shirley MacLaine) who wants to be his doormat. Unaccountably ignored by Minnelli critics, Some Came Running takes its energy from great performances (including Dean Martin as a lowlife gambler) and a bravura sense of graphic design. It's hard to believe the same director made Gigi that year, or that his cinematographer, William Daniels, had made his career shooting the Garbo classics. Here they find new color codes to suit the dull pretensions of a small town. The finale, shot on location, trumps even Hitchcock's amusement park climax in Strangers on a Train, by turning an actual Midwestern town into a CinemaScope hallucination.