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Listening to some of the greatest pop singers -- Sinatra, Presley, Charlie Rich, Billie Holiday -- often gives the impression of hearing people tell a story whose ending they don't yet know -- or don't want to admit that they know. And it's easy to imagine that part of what makes so many singers good actors is the instinct for translating the storytelling aspect of singing into acting. It may be that the declamatory nature of rap is what's being put into play when rappers act. There's an obvious connection between the subjects rap has dealt with and the subject of "Boyz N the Hood," but that alone doesn't account for the power of Ice Cube's performance, the hard-headed no-way-out manner in which his character hurtles himself toward his own death. And there is something far more complex than just the gangsta persona in Ice-T's performance as the head of an East St. Louis drug syndicate in Walter Hill's crackling and bleak action drama "Trespass" (a movie whose release was held up for six months by the L.A. riots and then treated as if its very existence might start more trouble). Ice-T plays King James with a leonine grace that Peckinpah might have envied, as a bad man doing his best to conduct himself with something like dignity, to make the best possible choice when only bad choices are open to him. It's the kind of performance that, just by the actor's bearing, earns an audience's respect. (Willie Nelson does something similar in his role as a legendary outlaw in Fred Schepisi's great western "Barbarosa.") And as the jazz singer in "Living Out Loud," Queen Latifah heads for different territory, the one staked out by a succession of sexy, sassy movie broads like Joan Blondell.

There appears to be an elusive but palpable connection between the manner in which singers feel their way into a song, playing with phrasing and tempo, and the way they act, alert yet relaxed, responsive to the rhythms of their fellow actors. In his movies with Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin hovered between sleazy hipster and amiable straight man. He's never gotten the credit he deserved for his dramatic roles. When a performer has a role that requires him to be in turmoil, being as natural as Martin was is an asset: it makes the audience feel very close to him. Martin (along with Van Heflin and Maureen Stapleton, who's amazing) is one of the only human things in that glossy 1970 soap opera in the sky "Airport." Martin plays the pilot of a disabled plane dealing not only with landing the crippled craft safely but with his crumbling marriage and the recent news that the stewardess he's been having an affair with (played by Jacqueline Bisset) is pregnant. Tending to her after she's injured in an on-board explosion, Martin shows a tenderness that cuts right through the cardboard proceedings. And he surpasses himself in his final scene. After the plane lands, he holds Bissett's hand as medical technicians rush her away to a hospital; his concern, which you see in every line of his face, is so focused on her that he walks unseeing right past his estranged wife, who's come to patch things up.

Martin's best performance came in the movie that may well be Howard Hawks' masterpiece, the 1958 "Rio Bravo." In a performance that turns his later comic-drunk persona inside out, Martin plays an ace deputy sheriff who's let himself slide into the bottle and go to seed over a broken love affair. Dirty, sweating and unshaven through much of the movie, going through the agony of withdrawal by pounding his deadened limbs with his fists as if he could force them to work as they used to, Martin has to carry much of the weight of Hawks' deceptively casual western. He is the embodiment of the movie's vision of human beings transcending their frailties. He carries it off with a depth that never ruffles the movie's affectionate comic surface. In his best moment, cleaned up and sober but ready to slide back into the bottle after one little setback, Martin reaches for a drink, raises it to his lips, then abruptly reaches for the bottle and pours it back. "Didn't spill a drop," he says and you can hear both surprise at his willpower and stifled bitterness at the way he has wasted himself.

Probably no singer ever translated the ease of singing to acting better than Martin's friend Frank Sinatra. There were plenty of comedies where he traded on his easygoing ring-a-ding-ding persona, and he deserves every bit of praise that ever came his way for his performance as the hotheaded and vulnerable Maggio in "From Here to Eternity." For me, though, it's 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate" that shows him at a peak of gravity and warmth and, finally, mournfulness that brings an undertow of soul to the wickedness of the film's political satire. In the film's final scene, and Sinatra's greatest moment on screen, he improvises a Medal of Honor citation for a fallen comrade and, while attempting to do justice to the horrors in which his comrade was made to participate, conveys the toll that his own participation in those events has taken on him. This is one of those moments where a role merges with an actor's off-screen persona. This isn't just Maj. Ben Marco we're seeing break down, it's Frank Sinatra, the essence of in-control cool. Could another actor have been as good in the role? Maybe. Would it have the same emotional effect? For me at least, it's impossible to imagine it would.

Each of us can come up with a performance or a moment that fulfills Ingmar Bergman's definition "Cinema is faces." Not actors (or not just actors), but faces, humanity and presence rather than merely technique. It's impossible to predict where those presences will come from, and that impossibility is one of the sustaining pleasures of movies: their ability to surprise you. It could be that the best watchwords for performers may have come from Al Jolson, who first brought sound movies to a wide audience in "The Jazz Singer": "You ain't heard nothin' yet."
salon.com | Sept. 7, 1999

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