54: The Man with the Golden Arm (with Spike Vincent)

SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast

Melbourne's Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) in North Richmond opened in 2018. This was the result of a years-long grassroots campaign led by the local community, fed up with constant overdoses in the streets. The MSIR operates on principles of harm reduction which simply work and urgently need to be applied throughout the world. The stigma around drug use, and the criminalising of drug users, must end - and that begins with us.

In 1955, Frank Sinatra made a historically significant contribution to the destigmatisation of drug use on film in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm. In a depiction that is in many ways still radical today, Sinatra's character of Frankie Machine is a regular person who is trying his best to shake off a heroin addiction but is simply failed by a society that does not have the means to support him. A compelling and empathetic performance by Sinatra, and subject matter which openly defied the Production Code of its era, made this a memorable classic for many and contributed to a better world.

This week on SUDDENLY, friend of the show Spike Vincent joins us to watch The Man With the Golden Arm, sharing his thoughts and personal experiences. Meanwhile, Rabia has been reading up on the MSIR and reports back on the experience of touring the facility to see what goes on first-hand. As a thematic wild card, we also watched an Australian DVD of the film called A Night at the Cinema with extra footage intended to replicate the experience of seeing this film in 1955 in a cinema in specifically Castlemaine, Victoria - including "God Save the Queen", a newsreel, cartoon, local ads etc - which leads us to compelling footage of the 1955 Maitland floods. Plus, an update on Bobby Long.

Sources for this episode: * The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) (watch in full - public domain) * Jack Pearl - Robin and the 7 Hoods (novelisation) (1964) * Lou Reed interview, "Reed Goes Public on Velvet Underground", The Canberra Times, 4 October 1987 * Nobody Dies Here: Inside Melbourne's Medically Supervised Injecting Room (2023) podcast * Judy Ryan - You Talk, We Die: The Battle for Victoria’s First Safe Injecting Facility (2022) * Link to book tours of the MSIR (Melbourne Supervised Injecting Room) * Photo of the "You Talk, We Die" mural in North Richmond * Stimulant Treatment Program at St Vincents Hospital in Sydney * A Year to Remember - 1955 (1965) Newsreel including Maitland flood footage * Katie Carr, "The problem with the 'disabled villain' trope", The Nora Project, 7 October 2022. * Detective Pikachu (2019) * Where to obtain Naloxone - official advice from Australian Government * Brian Jeffery, "Gays come out of the closet", The Canberra Times, 13 March 1982

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