…the outsider who sticks up two fingers at authority can’t quite count on the sympathies of his white audience any more – everyone is doing too well, and what they suffer from isn’t quite the failure of society to provide a decent life for them. Even Bogart had to adapt, and was replaced first by Marlon Brando and James Dean and then by Paul Newman – prettier and more athletic actors, less hard-boiled. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, meanwhile, brought into the white mainstream the legacies of Louis Armstrong and Lester Young. “For the wartime generation, Sinatra’s hedonistic cool came through a romantic soundscape meant to accompany leisure and domestic life in contrast to Bogart’s solitary bravado.”
