Based on James Jones' bitter critique of postwar America, Some Came Running stars Frank Sinatra as a cynical writer and WWII vet who returns unhappily to his small Midwestern hometown. Playing novelist Jones' alter ego, Sinatra is caught between bourgeois respectability—represented by his older brother (Arthur Kennedy)—and the low-life dissolution embodied by his drinking buddy Dean Martin and the feminine counterparts of these opposed forces, repressed schoolteacher Martha Hyer and naïve tramp Shirley MacLaine in one of her great early performances. Alternating between broad social statement and intimate character study, stylized melodrama and naturalistic local portrait (most of the exteriors were shot on location in Indiana), Some Came Running is a CinemaScope masterpiece. The film's climactic carnival sequence alone testifies conclusively to Minnelli's unerring command of the distinctive widescreen format.