Tony Rome and Lady in Cement

Two Late SixtiesPI films

Apr 02, 2025

Pick up The Last Exile and pre-order Nolan Chase’s A Lonesome Place for Murder

I’m of two minds about Tony Rome and its sequel, Lady in Cement. Put simply, neither are good but both are fun. Derivative, full of “of its time” problematic gags and caricatures, but packed with good costars and enjoyable scores, they sit at a strange midpoint in the PI genre, like a couple of ninety minute middling Rockford episodes.

Roger Ebert’s take on late 60s Sinatra is a good one:

“He wants to make good cop and private-eye movies, the kind Bogart specialized in, with terse dialog and good action sequences and the hero played as a weary cynic with an anti-establishment bias. The trouble in “Lady in Cement,” and to a lesser degree in “The Detective” and “Tony Rome,” is that Sinatra also wants to be Sinatra: running the show, slipping in-jokes over on us, writing in guest appearances for his needy friends.”

Both films started out as pulp novels by Marvin H Albert—who also wrote westerns and potboilers with names like Nice Guys Finish Dead—directed by Gordon Douglas and starring Frank Sinatra. Both read like someone who ripped through all of Chandler and both Ross and John D MacDonald before spitting out a mishmash of tropes.

Tony Rome lives in Florida on a boat he won gambling, drinks gin, flirts around but has a code, and comes to the aid of his friends. All of which is stolen pretty egregiously from the Travis McGee series. The case in the first film is a Lew Archer tale of a broken family, with a hard-partying daughter, weak patriarch, and mother with a secret.

The second film riffs on Darker Than Amber, with Rome finding a dead woman while skin diving. It segues to an oversized lummox based on Farewell My Lovely’s Moose Malloy, a bank robber named Waldo Gronsky, who hires Rome to prove his innocence on a murder charge.

Sinatra is no Bogart. Half the time he’s imitating Marlowe, and the other half playing himself. But he has moments, knows what a good PI film should have, and clearly enjoys throwing out one-liners like “This is not a family. It's a bunch of people living at the same address,” and "She's one blonde I know didn't have more fun.”

Sinatra is surrounded by quality actors in both films, Gena Rowlands and Jill St John figure in Tony Rome, and Raquel Welch in Lady in Cement. Richard Conte is the cop friend/adversary in both. There’s also some nice Miami scenery, and the moments of violence are sometimes fun and sometimes startlingly effective. Nancy Sinatra sings the title song for Tony Rome, and Hugo Montenegro did the score for Lady in Cement.

Equal parts clever and puerile, professionally done and dashed off, not just stuffed full of well-worn cliches but stitched together out of them, Tony Rome and Lady in Cement—you could call it Lazy in Cement—involve pale versions of a lot of stuff I love. Your mileage will vary, and probably should, but I can’t hate something stitched out of so many things I enjoy.