In a profile of Frank Sinatra published in 1955, in the midst of the star's second defining career ascent, Time magazine declared, “His new success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every area of showbusiness.”1 Time's use of Sinatra's urban industrial background to describe his extraordinary success is typical of the commentary surrounding the star in the 1950s which cast him as a working-class interloper and betrayed the problematic class dynamics frequently denied by post-war America's dominant culture. Sinatra's non-conformist behaviour, aggressive ambition, extreme experiences of success and failure, and the screen characters through which he portrayed alienation and disenfranchisement combined with this type of unsubtle critique in the development of Sinatra's conspicuous working-class star identity.