Films
The story of Frankie and Johnny has been the inspiration for several films, including Her Man (1930, starring Helen Twelvetrees), Frankie and Johnnie (1936, starring Helen Morgan), and Frankie and Johnny (1966, starring Elvis Presley). Terrence McNally's 1987 play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, was adapted for a 1991 film titled Frankie and Johnny starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer.
In 1930 director and actor John Huston wrote and produced a puppet play titled Frankie and Johnnie based on the Frankie Baker case. One of Huston's main sources was his interview with Baker and Britt’s neighbor Richard Clay.
Comedian Harry Langdon performs this song in his 1930 short "The Fighting Parson," in a variant on his vaudeville routine originally performed in blackface. Actress and playwright Mae West inserted her ballad in her successful Broadway play Diamond Lil. West sang the ballad again in her 1933 Paramount film She Done Him Wrong, which takes its title from the refrain, substituting genders. The song was used in the 1932 film Red-Headed Woman, In a scene where actress Jean Harlow's character is drinking and lamenting having been jilted by her married lover. It is also sung by a river boat crew in Bed of Roses, a film released the following year.
Duke Ellington recorded the tune on multiple occasions during the early 1940s.
Actress Mia Farrow in the role of Jacqueline De Bellefort sang/hummed a drunken rendition of the song in the key scene of the 1978 version of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, just before she attempts to shoot her former lover, Simon Doyle, played by Simon MacCorkindale.
The climax of Robert Altman's 2006 film A Prairie Home Companion is Lindsay Lohan's rendition of the song with quasi-improvisatory lyrics by Garrison Keillor.
The tune is often used for comic effect in animated cartoon shorts, such as those produced by Warner Bros. or MGM in the 1940s and 1950s, as a theme or leitmotif for a meretricious or zaftig woman. The song was the basis of a 1951 UPA cartoon Rooty Toot Toot, directed by John Hubley. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.
Read more about this topic: Frankie And Johnny (song)
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