Lewis Allen (1954)

An ordinary Saturday in a California backwater is transformed by news that the American president is coming to town that very afternoon.  Only a flying visit:  he’ll be on a train due at 5pm then walk to a car that will drive him to a nearby ranch.  A telegram directs town sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden) to lay on suitable presidential transport, liaise with the security service men coming in advance of the VIP, and keep things strictly confidential.  Dan Carney (Willis Bouchey), head of the security detail, tells Tod he’ll need the buildings facing the railway station checked – a row of shops and an overlooking hilltop house.  Tod, as he assures Carney, knows all the shop proprietors.  He knows the folks who live on the hill – the Benson family – even better.  In the opening scenes of Suddenly Tod was unsuccessfully trying to court Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), as well as chatting with her son, Pidge (Kim Charney).  Ellen’s father-in-law, who owns the family house, ‘used to be in the Secret Service before a bad ticker retired him’.   That brings a smile to Carney’s face – Pete ‘Pop’ Benson was once his boss.  The security presence is to be reinforced by five cars of state police, who soon arrive in town.  Another car waits for them to go by.  Inside this one are three men who then make their way to the Bensons’ place.  John Baron (Frank Sinatra) introduces himself and his companions (Christopher Dark and Paul Frees) as FBI agents; Pop Benson (James Gleason) welcomes them in.  They’re not FBI men but hired assassins.

On its original release, Suddenly was well enough received by critics but didn’t set the box office alight.  It’s a modest production in terms of scale (most of the action takes place inside the Benson house, where Baron and his sidekicks are soon holding the family and Tod Shaw hostage) and length (only seventy-seven minutes).  Its main selling point was that it marked Frank Sinatra’s first film appearance after From Here to Eternity (shortly before Young at Heart).  The theatrical release poster includes an image of an Academy Award, referring to the star’s Oscar for his previous screen outing, below an announcement, in much bigger print, that Sinatra in Suddenly is ‘a savage, sensation-hungry killer’.  Dan Carney’s attention is drawn to the hilltop house because it strikes him as ideally placed to allow someone inside to take a pot shot at the president.  Like the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.  In its afterlife, Suddenly acquired unexpected notoriety – especially when a story took hold that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it shortly before shooting President Kennedy.   A year prior to that, a higher-profile film involving an American political assassination arrived in cinemas. The Manchurian Candidate also starred Frank Sinatra.  There’s another story, probably apocryphal but durable too, that, in the light of Kennedy’s death, Sinatra made attempts to prevent either film being seen publicly again.

Since all this might seem to characterise Suddenly as a piece of fiction which is retrospectively looks not just startling but irresponsible, it’s worth drawing attention to a couple of points.  First, although the final corpse count in the movie is high, it doesn’t include the president, whose train, in the event, passes through the station without stopping.  (It becomes clear to the security men in town that something fishy is going on.)  Second, Richard Sale’s script reminds the viewer that presidential assassination in America, though presented as bizarrely unthinkable in the film’s virtually present-day setting, isn’t:  Baron derides the predecessors who shot and killed Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.  Yet Suddenly‘s scenario does resonate – not only with Oswald’s vantage point but also with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.  Baron isn’t personally motivated to kill the president.  He’s a hitman preparing to do a well-paid job of work on behalf of invisible, unidentified paymasters.

As soon as it starts, Suddenly‘s title is more striking (and discomfiting) than you expected it to be.  The action begins (pre-opening titles) with Tod’s deputy Slim Adams (Paul Wexler) giving directions to a passing motorist (Roy Engel) who wants to get to a place called Three Rivers.  Before he drives off, the motorist asks what town he’s in and Slim replies ‘Suddenly’; when the motorist says that’s a funny name, Slim explains it’s a ‘hangover from the old days – that’s the way things used to happen here.  Suddenly.  Roads agents, gamblers, gunfighters’.   A few screen minutes later, the word ‘Hangover’ crops up in another context:  it’s the security services’ codeword for the arrangements around the president’s visit.  In his conversation with the motorist, Slim jokes that nowadays things happens so slowly in the town the council ‘wants to change the name to “Gradually”’.  Charles G Clarke’s cinematography easily evokes the small-town atmosphere and the required sense of it-was-just-another-day-until.  Yet the black-and-white images, especially the shots of shop fronts on the town’s deserted main street, have a flavour too of contemporary news reports – of serious crimes committed in unassuming, unexpected places.   David Raskin’s score and the use Lewis Allen makes of it are unnerving.  In the early stages, the music is a restless, jangling counterpoint to the bland visuals.  It’s less in evidence (or seems so) once the drama is fully underway.

Suddenly‘s morality is an odd concoction.  Still grieving for her husband, who was killed in action in World War II[1], Ellen can’t return Tod’s affections and bitterly resents that both he and Pop are encouraging young Pidge’s interest in guns.  (There’s more than one play on real vs toy guns.)  Her father-in-law sharply rebukes Ellen for her pacifism and over-protectiveness of Pidge; before Baron et al have arrived on the scene, Pop tells her to stop ‘acting like a woman‘ and that her late husband, if he could hear her now, would be ashamed of her.  Ellen is set up as needing to learn a moral (and political) lesson, and she surely does.  In the climax to the story, it’s she who shoots Baron.  She comes to realise, in extremis, that a woman’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (even if John Wayne didn’t say that on screen until 1965).  On the whole, the film appears to confirm the time-honoured Hollywood/NRA precept that ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’.  Baron, though, is a less straightforward matter.  It’s true we have only his word for what he says about his past but his claim to have received the Silver Star for ‘killing Jerries’ at least raises the question of whether psychopaths can come in useful in warfare.  Asked if he never thinks about his parents, Baron replies, ‘I used to think of them a great deal.  My mother wasn’t married.  My old man was a dipso.  They left me in a home’.

The people who made Suddenly may not have expected or even intended Baron’s description of his wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing to carry exculpatory weight, even though that was becoming a regular theme in post-war American cinema.  The poster’s lurid description of Baron is merely inaccurate hype – the film presents him as businesslike and cold-blooded (‘Show me a guy with feelings and I’ll show you a sucker’) rather than ‘sensation-hungry’.  More significantly, the filmmakers probably knew that audiences wouldn’t buy Baron’s hard luck story (or critics:  the Newsweek reviewer labelled him ‘one of the most repellent killers in American screen history’).  Yet Frank Sinatra not only makes Baron credible, as he proves that being a good ‘heavy’ needn’t depend on poundage.  He also uses his underdog quality to confounding effect.  Sterling Hayden’s size and presence contribute importantly to this – even when Tod Shaw is sitting down, nursing a bullet wound.  Tod wants to know more about Baron’s war record and asks questions that rattle him.  This seems to confirm Baron as a little guy on the receiving end.

Hayden’s tough straightforwardness is invaluable, ensuring there’s nothing either falsely virtuous about Tod’s resistance to Baron or soppy in his overtures to Ellen.  And Willis Bouchey is just right as Carney, keeping himself in the background but also watchful:  it’s shocking when he’s the first fatality.  Some of the supporting players are less satisfying.  Paul Wexler’s eccentric looks serve to distract from his wooden line readings but Christopher Dark and Paul Frees, as Baron’s excessively contemptible henchmen are just ropy.  James Gleason is a good actor but the wily pep he gives Pop Benson makes an annoying character all the more annoying.  Even allowing for her unenviable role, Nancy Gates is alarmingly clenched.  At the end, with the siege over and Ellen able to give Tod romantic hope for the future, Gates still stands tensely, arms crossed over her chest, hands clasping her upper arms.  Some may see this as noir stylisation; it struck this viewer as what generations of Hollywood actresses have done when they can’t think of anything better.  Plucky Pidge wants to be a sheriff when he grows up.  Stocky, wide-faced Kim Charney is alarming as the upholder-to-be of the rule of law, easier to take when the kid resorts to schoolyard abuse of the Baron gang (‘You stink!).

The two groups of soi-disant government men are similarly dressed; both flash official-looking credentials as they introduce themselves to others.  There’s a brief moment early in Suddenly, one of the best in the whole film, when you may be not quite sure which of these men are nefarious fakes and which – if any – bona fide.  Despite the variable performances, Lewis Allen does a good job of handling the claustrophobic action inside the Bensons’ home – yet there’s something almost blackly comical about the gathering too, especially when an amiable, bewildered television repair man (James O’Hara, appearing as James Lilburn) arrives to join it.  (Thanks to resourceful Pop, the Bensons’ temperamental TV set plays a crucial part in taking out the baddies.)  The story ends, not surprisingly, as it began.  A second motorist (Ted Stanhope) stops to ask directions.  This time it’s Tod who obliges and who, when told ‘That’s a funny name for a town’, says, almost to himself, ‘Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know about that …’   Richard Sale’s script includes plenty of lines better than this closing one but Sterling Hayden makes it work.

15 June 2020

[1] I’m assuming World War II rather than the recently-ended Korean War.  If that’s right, Suddenly isn’t set in quite the present day:  there’s a reference to the death of Ellen’s husband ‘three years ago’.  Richard Sale’s screenplay, adapted from his short story Active Duty, was published in Blue Book magazine in 1943.  That’s according to Wikipedia, which also claims that Sale got the idea for his story from reading ‘in the news about President Dwight D Eisenhower traveling to and from Palm Springs, California by train’.  Perhaps, but Eisenhower certainly wasn’t doing much of that (let alone serving as president) at the time the story appeared in Blue Book.