Warner Bros. "The Golden Years" is one of five DVD sets released this week that spotlight Frank Sinatra's sometimes great, sometimes spotty acting career.

In the early 1950s, Frank Sinatra was primarily regarded as Ava Gardner's boy toy, a has-been with anger-management issues and a voice that had gone south.

Then he played Maggio in "From Here to Eternity," won his Oscar, and everybody sat up and paid attention again. Sinatra followed that with a series of the most emotionally ravaging albums ever made, but the comeback was started by acting, not music.

But he was never taken seriously as an actor, partly because he only occasionally seemed to take acting seriously.

"My father didn't have the formal acting training that his peers had," pointed out Tina Sinatra, his youngest daughter. "Most of the people he worked with originated from theater, and I don't know if he felt he had the acting prowess to redo an emotional scene over and over again."

But a reassessment of Sinatra's film legacy may be about to start. To mark this week's 10-year anniversary of Sinatra's death, Warner Bros. is releasing five DVD sets today covering 22 titles, including two five-disc sets.

Included are such seminal Sinatra films as "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "Some Came Running," as well as lighter fare: "The Tender Trap," "It Happened in Brooklyn," "Higher and Higher" and the notoriously awful "The Kissing Bandit."

Sinatra's acting career is like a bell-shaped curve, at least in terms of ambition. In the beginning, he was the singing male ingenue of Louis B. Mayer's MGM. Those early films are still extremely entertaining and, in terms of the juvenile sweetness that Sinatra radiates, surprising.

After a short interruption for the darkness of his marriage to Gardner and a vocal breakdown, followed by the regeneration of "From Here to Eternity," there's a rapidly ascending parabola of ambition and effort. "Guys and Dolls" and "High Society" don't ask much of him beyond his voice and his charm, although the hopelessly Italian Sinatra trying to give a proper ethnic tinge to the Jewish "Guys and Dolls" is amusing.

But Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm," in which Sinatra plays card sharp and recovering junkie Frankie Machine, is something else again. The film itself is problematic — it looks cheap and stage-bound — but Sinatra goes all the way with a performance of total physical and emotional commitment.

Tina Sinatra said that her father's gift, whether singing or acting, was essentially self-taught.

"Dad was serious when he started, but at the beginning of the '50s, it became difficult to perpetuate himself as an actor," Tina Sinatra said. "Personally and professionally, he was not at the top of his game and not doing anything well. When he got hold of it a second time, acting was very important to him and he had to prove it to himself that he could do it more than once.

"He would say to us that he had to prove he could go beyond Maggio in From Here to Eternity,' prove that it wasn't a fluke," Tina Sinatra continued. "There were always rumors that Ava got him the job, or that (director) Fred Zinnemann had to beat him up to get the performance. He took The Man With the Golden Arm' by design, and if that's not taking acting seriously, I don't know what is."

Sinatra's last theatrical movie was an ignominious comedy western for MGM in 1970 called "Dirty Dingus Magee." For Sinatra, acting had become hard work — too hard.

"He lost interest when they weren't coming to him anymore," Tina Sinatra said. "After that, I'm not sure the scripts were coming to him, I'm not sure the memorization was easy for him. For years, I was doing his reading, and if I sent him a dozen scripts in 10 years, that was it. It's not like he was turning down Martin Scorsese."

But now we have "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "Some Came Running" to remind us that when Sinatra did feel up to it, he brought something to the table — rebellion, muted anger and a wounded soul — that made him a peer of John Garfield and Robert Mitchum.