The Night we called it a Day

The comic potential in the story of Frank Sinatra’s 1974 Australian concert tour, when off-colour remarks to the local press incurred the wrath of the unions and left him a virtual prisoner in his Sydney hotel room, seems fairly obvious, but that doesn’t prevent this ill-judged frolic making the disastrous assumption we’ll be more interested in the plucky Aussie promoter’s tangled love life. Joel ‘Kinky Boots’ Edgerton works hard in the role, but his ill-starred romance with his secretary is so painfully underwritten it clogs the rest of the picture, where Dennis Hopper is intriguing casting as Ol’ Blue Eyes even if he never quite disappears into the role and proves somewhat stiff on stage when miming to an impressive soundalike. Although the idea’s to show the two men learning from one another, fact and fluff fail to make a persuasive blend, though things pick up when David Field’s union boss enters the fray, playing future PM Bob Hawke as a canny egotist grandstanding on the cause of a supposedly affronted nation. Occasionally amusing, but it’s not enough.