The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

  This movie took me three days to get through.  Jesus H., but it's depressing.

Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) just got out of the joint for dealing cards in an illegal poker game and comes back to his old neighborhood in Chicago.  He's pretty sanguine about the whole thing since he got into a treatment program while in jail and kicked his heroin addiction.  His new plan is to become a drummer and get him and his wife Zosch (Eleanor Parker), out of their dive apartment.  Zosch is kind of a harpy, though, and doesn't want Frankie to do anything but what he did before, fearing that he will leave her if he gets any success.  She constantly throws the fact that she's in a wheelchair because of him crashing their car while drunk in his face, even though she can actually walk.  Say it with me now:  What a bitch.  So Frankie gets roped back in to dealing cards and gets re-hooked on heroin.  Mixed into everything is Molly (Kim Novak), a cocktail hostess with a heart of gold and a weakness for substance abusers.  Things proceed down this dark spiral, culminating in the death of Louie, the heroin pusher (Darren McGavin).  Frankie has to quit cold turkey in order to clear his name.

This movie combined all the cringe-factor of Requiem for a Dream with the warmth and cuddliness of, well, Requiem for a Dream.  Seriously, this is one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen.  It's an unflinching view of addiction that was really avant-garde for its time.  Of course it didn't get an MPAA rating for the scenes of intense drug use and addiction, but director Otto Preminger didn't really care about that and three Oscar nominations seem to back him up.

I think the film survives pretty well for being over 50 years old.  God knows, I won't ever watch it again but it's still a really well-done movie.  I'm giving it the 'liked it' tag because I approve of it, not because I enjoyed it.