The year-end holidays are a time when, here at TCM, we particularly enjoy offering rare treats to help you, as the Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane song goes, to "have yourself a merry little Christmas." Last year we showed 43 movie gems starring Cary Grant. In other Decembers it's been Fred Astaire, including all 10 of the dance-a-thon movies he made with Ginger; before that Barbara Stanwyck and 55 of her best movies; and one year it was William Powell, and included all his Thin Man whodunit's with Myrna Loy. This year our December spotlight will solidly be on--drum-roll here--Frank Sinatra, this month marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

We'll be showing not only 35 of the most important films in his high-octane career but also five TV specials he did between 1965 and 2011, including, on December 23, a holiday musical gift called Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank (1957). In this special, he shares a stage doing holiday songs with the great Mr. Crosby, Frank's longtime friend who once famously said, "A voice like Sinatra's comes along once in a lifetime... but why did he have to come along in mine?"

Every Wednesday we'll be showing all the important Sinatra film landmarks, from an early screen appearance in 1943 singing "Night and Day" in a B-level Ann Miller musical titled Reveille with Beverly to five films from his years at MGM, where he survived being consistently miscast as the nerdy second banana too scared to talk to a girl in films such as Anchors Aweigh (1945), On the Town (1949) and It Happened in Brooklyn (1947). (Come on, Sinatra nerdy? Fagidaboudit).

We'll also show, of course, his brilliant dramatic turns in From Here to Eternity (1953), Suddenly (1954), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Some Came Running (1958), also Frank during his icon-in-residence period in such films as High Society (1956), Pal Joey (1957) and a Sinatra thriller we've never shown before, 1968's The Detective with Lee Remick.

Mixed in with all that, I'll also be mentioning some of the Sinatra films we'd be showing if the fates hadn't interfered along the way: movies such as On the Waterfront (1954), which Frank was at one point signed to do (and would have been brilliant in; think about it) until Marlon Brando decided he wanted to do it, leading to a $500,000 lawsuit by Frank against producer Sam Spiegel. There was also the Jack Lemmon role in Some Like It Hot (1959), which was first offered to Frank. Carousel (1956) was another project that almost happened-- Sinatra pre-recording all the songs for it with Shirley Jones, and showing up for the first day of shooting but then, for reasons never fully explained, he walked off the premises and never returned. (That was a major loss for him and the film.) Many other projects also came close to happening: the Jack Lemmon role in Mister Roberts (1953), Sinatra as Dirty Harry (1971), a musical remake of Born Yesterday with Marilyn Monroe; and an original titled Paris by Night with Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot. The list is a long one.

But we're grateful for the films he did leave with us. Although moviemaking was never the ultimate goal for him that music always was, there's no doubt that eight words say it all about this amazingly charismatic, talented man, often called "the greatest singer of the 20th century": He came. He sang and acted. He conquered. And our lives are all the richer because of it.

by Robert Osborne