Frank Sinatra

Suddenly

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Sidekick Bart with Frank Sinatra's John Baron

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, … Read more

The Manchurian Candidate

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A sweaty, brainwashed Raymond Shaw

Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments. The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been abducted … Read more

High Society

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Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Louis Calhern in High Society

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 June Cole Porter born, 1891 On this day in 1891, the songwriter Cole Porter was born. The only child of wealthy parents – his mother was the daughter of “the richest man in Indiana” – Porter showed early signs of musical precocity and was writing songs from the age of ten. Later, at Yale, where he studied English, music and French, he wrote 300 songs and several musical comedies. Moving on to Harvard to study law (his rich grandfather’s wish) he continued to write prolifically and eventually switched from the study of law to music, though he didn’t tell his … Read more