Sinatra, Martin, MacLaine: Big-hearted drifters run up against small-town ways.

After a round of partying he can't remember, World War II veteran Dave Hirsh is placed on a bus headed for the last place he'd choose: Parkman, Indiana, the hometown Hirsh hasn't seen in well over a decade.

Frank Sinatra plays Hirsh, whose arrival in Parkman brings small-town hypocrisy to the unforgiving light of day in this character-driven tale directed by Vincente Minnelli and based on a novel by James Jones (whose From Here to Eternity has led to Sinatra's 1953 Oscar). In his first screen pairing with Sinatra, Dean Martin, plays a sharp-witted cardsharp. And Shirley MacLaine earned one of the movie's five Academy Award nominations as the good-hearted floozie with a potentially fatal attraction to Hirsh.