The Best Is Yet to Come

Lore & Background

The Ahlert brothers, Fred E. and Jack, were a prolific songwriting team in Hollywood's golden age, penning tunes for a host of studio pictures. Their collaboration with Sinatra in the late 1950s placed "The Best Is Yet to Come" squarely in the tradition of the MGM-and-RKO-era musical film, where a lead singer would deliver a thematic anchor number that both advanced the plot and let the star flex his interpretive range. Sinatra's delivery of the track is characteristically unhurried; he lets the melody breathe, leans into the phrasing with a slight forward lean, and treats the optimism in the lyrics not as a platitude but as a hard-won conviction. The arrangement, typical of the period, pairs a warm string bed with a light rhythmic pulse that keeps the song from tipping into sentimentality. Within Some Kind of a Way, the song functions as an emotional counterweight to the film's more turbulent romantic scenes. Sinatra's character has just lost something precious, and rather than delivering a wailing lament, he pivots toward hope. That narrative choice mirrored Sinatra's own life at the time—he had recently divorced Ava Gardner, was navigating the fallout from his political associations, and was rebuilding his public image. Audiences in 1959 heard, in his phrasing, a man genuinely trying to believe what he was singing. That authenticity is what separates a studio obligation from a performance that lingers in the cultural memory decades later. The song's afterlife has been steady rather than explosive. It has been covered by a scattered handful of artists, sampled in jazz and easy-listening compilations, and referenced in retrospectives on Sinatra's filmography. It does not enjoy the instant-recognition of "My Way" or "New York, New York," but among dedicated Sinatra fans it is a touchstone for a particular emotional register: the quiet, stubborn insistence that things will get better, delivered without a hint of melodrama.

Reader's Guide

The song's most visible cultural footprint is its placement in Some Kind of a Way, where it anchors the film's emotional arc. In a picture that otherwise leans on Sophia Loren's star power and a breezy romantic-plot structure, Sinatra's delivery of the number is the one moment the camera lingers on his face without cutting to the co-stars. That directorial choice—Cukor giving Sinatra a full, unbroken vocal—signaled to 1959 audiences that the song was the film's thesis statement, not mere set-dressing. It mattered because it reinforced the idea that a Sinatra musical number could carry narrative weight equal to a monologue. In the broader pop-culture landscape, the track became a shorthand for a specific Sinatra mode. When later compilations, biographies, or TV retrospectives needed to illustrate "Sinatra the optimist" as opposed to "Sinatra the rebel," producers reached for this song. It appeared on late-1990s and 2000s nostalgia playlists aimed at baby-boomer audiences, and its title has been borrowed in marketing copy, book chapters, and even a few independent film credits as a stock phrase for forward-looking hope. The Ahlert brothers' name, meanwhile, has become a small but persistent footnote in musicology. Their catalog is uneven, but the fact that they supplied a Sinatra film number that still gets mentioned in fan forums and academic surveys of 1950s pop ballads gives their partnership a longevity that most studio-commissioned songs of that era never achieve. The song endures not because it broke records, but because it captured a mood—steady, unshowy, quietly defiant—that listeners keep returning to whenever they need a reminder that the next chapter is still unwritten.

Did You Know?

• The Ahlert brothers wrote the song specifically for Sinatra's film, tailoring the melody to his vocal range and phrasing habits rather than handing him a generic studio number.
• In Some Kind of a Way, the track is performed in a scene that deliberately contrasts with the film's more dramatic romantic confrontation, giving the audience a moment of emotional reset.