Suddenly is apparently the movie that Lee Harvey Oswald watched before setting out to kill President John F Kennedy. God knows why Oswald was looking to it for inspiration because things don’t end triumphantly at all for the guys on screen trying to assassinate their own US president. It is triumphant as a movie though, a strange, small, short drama in many ways as odd as its title.
Suddenly is the name of the town where the whole thing is set, a nowheresville with a railroad station that’s essentially just a halt on the line, where a telegraph operator receives a message over the wire – prepare to receive the US president this afternoon, on an unpublicised stopover en route to the west coast.
The town is propelled into a frenzy of activity, yet knowledge of what exactly is going on is restricted to a chosen few – notably town sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden), a big gruff guy who we meet trying to persuade war widow Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates) into being his girl, while also heavy-handedly trying to persuade her to let her fatherless son have a toy pistol, which she’s very much against.
Having a gun turns out to be what the entire film is about. In potent messaging that could almost be endorsed by the National Rifle Association it turns out that it’s people who shoot people not guns, and that killing isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.
But before all that director Lewis Allen paints a cute portrait of an average small town all the while filling the frame with the dramatis personae of his drama – police arrive, and so does a detail of presidential security guys, the state troopers and a small team from the FBI, headed by John Baron (Frank Sinatra).
Except Baron and his two right hand men are not FBI at all, but assassins who have soon installed themselves in the house where Ellen lives with her dead husband’s father, “Pops” Benson (James Gleason), and her son, the precocious Pidge (Kim Charney).
From this vantage point overlooking the station Baron and co plan to take out the president, unless Pops, Ellen and Pidge, later joined by cop Tod and Jud (James O’Hara), a TV repair man who just happens along, can somehow stop them.
We’re one year on from Sinatra’s Oscar win for From Here to Eternity and he’s very good again here as Baron, shading his performance from purposeful pretend FBI guy to obvious psychopath as the moment of truth gets ever nearer.
In a movie that divides killing into the good and bad sort, we learn that Tod was a war hero and so his killing was obviously virtuous. While Baron, an assassin killing for a paycheck, is the opposite. The backbone of the movie’s last stretch consists mostly of ascertaining what Baron actually did during the war, whether his record is quite as glorious as he repeatedly insists it is. In powerful scenes buildong to a knuckle-clenching climax, Sterling Hayden throws off some early hesitancy as Tod repeatedly goads Baron with insinuations about what he might really have done in the war and really comes into his own.
It’s neat, it’s compact and above all it’s claustrophobic. Folksy too, in its portrait of god-fearing everyday Americans with a patriotic respect for their elected president and a sense of shared duty that spurs them on to glory, against which Baron is painted as the exact opposite.
Not all is good. Gleason’s acting is distractingly bad as Pops, and there are a couple of small roles that should probably have been recast. But Sinatra, Hayden, Gates and Charney are all compelling, while Hayden’s transformation of Tod from hectoring, almost bullying, would-be suitor into something more tender matches Gates’s portrayal of Ellen as a sap who wises up. It all happens quite suddenly, in Suddenly.
Suddenly – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
