Pacino and De Niro as Sinatra and Dino? Ring-a-ding-DON'T, Marty!

The real deal: Dean Martin (l.) and Frank Sinatra in the early 1960s.

According to this account, Martin Scorsese, who has been toying with a film about Rat Packers Frank Sinatra and/or Dean Martin for more than a decade, told a newspaper in India (he was doing press for "Shutter Island," which just opened there) that his troubles with the project include finding the right actors for the parts. "I'm yet to spot the actor who can bring back Frank Sinatra alive on screen," he is quoted (misquoted, actually, to my ear) as saying. "My choice is Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro as Dean Martin."

Um: whoa?

Too old to rock-n-roll: Robert De Niro (l.) and Al Pacino in THEIR 60s

Let me say for starters that, duh, Scorsese is right: In the abstract, De Niro would be hilarious and droll as Dean Martin, and in the abstract Pacino has the bantamweight volatility to make a superb Sinatra. And while a Pacino-Scorsese project is long overdue, and, for that matter, it would be nice to see a reunion of De Niro and Scorsese, who haven't made a film together since "Casino," which premiered 15 (!) years ago, this is the wrong way to go, utterly, with these parts.
 
I know a little bit about the Rat Pack, and in fact I'm currently involved in a 25,000 project of captions and chapter heads for a museum-quality limited edition book of never-before-seen Rat Pack photos. And what strikes me here right away is that there's an unbridgeable gap between Pacino and De Niro and Sinatra and Martin, namely age. Indeed, the aging of the American male is such a strong part of the story of the Rat Pack and its ring-a-ding-ding moment in the sun that to get it so wrong from the start is to face doom.

When they went to Las Vegas in 1960 to make "Ocean's Eleven" and perform their famed Rat Pack Summit shows at the Sands Hotel, Frank Sinatra was 44 and Dean Martin was 42: just cresting toward middle age. Their adolescent antics -- coupled, notoriously, with genuinely hair-raising backstage stuff, like introducing the next President of the United States to the Don of the Chicago Mob -- was the stuff of a mid-life crisis, both for them and for the culture they embodied. It was grown-up and teenaged at once; Sinatra and Dean didn't think much of rock and roll, but they thrived on the license with which it had informed the popular culture. And their acting-out was done with enough polish and musk and muscle to captivate the world.

Pacino and De Niro are 69 and 66, respectively -- a quarter-century older than Frank and Dean at the moment of their zenith. True, the two singers stayed close for years and performed together until they were nearly as old as Pacino and De Niro are today, but clearly the world is not waiting to see Scorsese make a movie about these guys:

No, we want the young, hot, fiery Frank and Dean that were portrayed -- quite ably -- by Ray Liotta and Joe Mantegna in HBO's "The Rat Pack" back in, gulp, 1998. Those guys had the power and sexuality and ease that we think of when we conjure the glory days of the Rat Pack. To see them portrayed by septugenarians playing at being fortysomething would be like watching corpses propped up in caskets and painted to look like teens. NO SALE.

With all the respect Pacino and De Niro and, particularly, Scorsese, who was shooting from the hip, no doubt, with these comments, THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.

Scorsese already has worked with actors who are the right age, look and temperament to take on these roles: Leonardo Di Caprio, Mark Wahlberg, Mark Ruffalo, even Johnny Depp, who'd be a new collaborator for him. Best fish in those waters, Mr. S., to find your Frank and Dean.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2010/05/pacino_and_de_niro_as_sinatra.html