Suddenly

I cam across this DVD (1954) while looking for Singing in the rain on the PN shelves. Looked it up, and it sounded interesting.


Suddenly is the name of the small town invaded by professional assassin Frank Sinatra and his henchmen. Taking a local family hostage, Sinatra sets up a vigil at the second-story window of the family's home. From here, he intends to kill the President of the United States when the latter makes a whistle-stop visit. The film's tension level is enough to induce goose pimples from first scene to last. Sinatra is outstanding as the disgruntled war vet who hopes to become a "somebody" by killing the president. The parallels between his character and Lee Harvey Oswald's are too close for comfort, so much so that Suddenly was withdrawn from local TV packages for several years after the JFK assassination. Sinatra would claim in later years that he himself engineered the removal of Suddenly from general distribution, though in fact he'd lost whatever rights he'd held on the film when it lapsed into public domain. Be sure and miss the notorious colorized version of this black-and-white thriller, wherein Sinatra is transformed into Ol' Brown Eyes.

Well, they tried. It moves along fine. But to speak of tension is to stretch it. Sinatra tries to inject a touch of psychosis, or some sort of mental instability into his character, and almost makes it. Almost. His partners in crime are rank amateurs (both as criminals, and the actors). The good guys are wooden. Nice try. I can believe that the subject matter became very touchy after November 22, 1963. Still.