Curiosities & Time Capsules -- This Crooner Is For Hire

Suddenly (1954, Lewis Allen) *****


“Tonight at five o'clock I kill the President. One-second after five there's a new President. What changes? Nothing!”


Often described as a film noir, I think of Suddenly as a tight B-movie capturing Frank Sinatra on the upswing of his show business comeback - a foreshadowing of things to come for both Frank and the rest of us.
Smack in-between the two seminal events of Sinatra’s comeback from the show business junkyard; the Oscar for From Here To Eternity and releasing the single Young At Heart (cut with his new arranger Nelson Riddle), Suddenly was released in October of 1954 by United Artists.
I first saw this as a public domain VHS tape on sale at a video store for a buck or two. Sinatra movies have always held special interest for me, as my mother was a fan; but Suddenly slipped through my television experience.
The best “B-movies” have their own cosmology. Each one exists in a cosmos where the most improbable of coincidences make perfect sense and the inevitable climatic twist (or surprise) is foreshadowed at the beginning. Suddenly has such a marker in its first few minutes and delivers quite a wallop at the end. Moreover like the perfect “B-picture” it satisfies and makes one want to come back for more.
The action takes place, in real time, in a small California town called Suddenly –


First Driver: [stops car to ask for directions] Officer, can you tell me the way to Three Rivers? 

Slim Adams: About two miles to the first main intersection, then turn left. It's about sixty miles. 

First Driver: Thanks. What town is this?
Slim Adams: Suddenly. 

First Driver: Suddenly what?
Slim Adams: No no. That's the name. 

First Driver: [laughs] That's a funny name for a town.
Slim Adams: Uh huh. Hangover from the old days. That's the way things used to happen here: suddenly.
First Driver: I see.
Slim Adams: Road agent, gamblers, gunfighters.
First Driver: Well, I take it things have changed. 

Slim Adams: Uh huh. Things happen so slow now, the town council is figuring to change the name to Gradually. 

First Driver: [laughs] Thanks, officer. 
[begins to drive away] 

Slim Adams: Pleasure. Come back.


Suddenly is the quintessential 1950s small American town. Where everyone knows everyone and all play by the rules. It has a main street where everyone shops and a grocery store just up the block from the toy store where you can buy a six-bit toy gun.
Microscopic in its detail of character Suddenly opens showing us just how the small town operates along the main drag over looked by a small house on the hill that will be stage for the main action of the film.
Despite wearing the familiar fedora this is not the affable Frank of the MGM years. After playing streetwise character of Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Suddenly provides the training wheels for future anti-hero film roles. Frank plays John Baron a sociopath turned psychotic during WW2. Barton is forever boasting about the Silver Star he won for being a “successful killer of Gerrys. “I did a lot of chopping in the last war…” he brags (it’s interesting he doesn’t acknowledge Korea). In peacetime he has turned gun for hire with the President of United States as his current target. Whether he works for the mob (or better the National Crime Syndicate identified in the recent Kefauver Hearings) or as a specter, hired by a foreign government (located behind the Iron Curtain). We are never told.

Sinatra is amazing is his ability to unwind his character - in real time - from credible G-man conning his way into the lives of innocents to a full-on psychotic monster. Frank goes full throttle in his ease to violence and comfort in his sadistic cruelty. His smile when kicking the sheriff in his recently broken arm is uncomfortably reminiscent of Richard Widmark pushing the old lady in a wheel chair down the stairs in Kiss of Death.
Sterling Haden shares above the title billing, playing against his hard-boiled film noir type as the sheriff who is willing to sacrifice all for the life of this commander-in-chief. A red blooded American through and through.
Hayden’s career seemed to be back on track having ditched the notion that he was a communist sympathizer (after his real life WWII heroics in Yugoslavia – and metal from Tito). He made five films in 1954; most notably Johnny Guitar (d. Nichols Ray). It can only be described as a gender-bender of a western, with Hayden playing second banana to Joan Crawford; it’s impossible to tell who was more macho.
Standing six-feet five-inches tall Hayden towers over Sinatra when side-by-side but in close-ups and full frame shots Sinatra dominates until the inevitable climax.
Just as important as its strong thematic connection to The Manchurian Candidate, Suddenly demonstrates Sinatra’s desire to risk making movies with controversial subject matter. His next Oscar nomination was in 1955 for The Man With the Golden Arm and he very much wanted to make a movie about the execution of Private Slovik (the only American executed for desertion during the second world war) written by blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz in 1960. Wikipedia advises that as Sinatra was campaigning for John F. Kennedy for President, the Kennedy camp was naturally concerned, and ultimately persuaded Sinatra to cancel the project. Which is ironic in that it was JFK’s encouragement that persuaded Sinatra to make The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.
Since first watching it I have always been drawn to Suddenly. I’m not sure why. It may be how perfectly in time it follows the Kefauver hearings into organized crime and Sinatra’s real life relationships with key mobsters. Or it maybe because it anticipates the importance of the mob in electing JFK (with Frank as conduit). And there is the matter of the mob being involved in President's assassination. But mostly it's the urban legend that Oswald watched Suddenly on local television before that fateful day in Dallas. Isn’t that why the movie was withdrawn like The Manchurian Candidate isn’t it? That did happen didn’t it?


As a side show it’s interesting to note that Hayden actually won a Silver Star in the war and Sinatra never severed in the military.