Suddenly (1954 film)

Suddenly is a 1954 black and white American noir crime film directed by Lewis Allen with a screenplay written by Richard Sale. The drama stars Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden, and features James Gleason and Nancy Gates.

The story concerns a small California town whose tranquility is shattered when the train of the president of the United States is scheduled to make a stop there, and a hired assassin and his henchmen take over a home that provides a perfect vantage point from which to assassinate the president.

Plot

thumb|thumbtime=60 | Suddenly (1954)

A train carrying the president of the United States is scheduled to make a stop in the small town of Suddenly, California. Claiming to be part of the FBI detail checking up on security before the president's arrival, three men arrive at the home of the Benson family: Ellen, an over-protective war widow, her young son "Pidge", and her father-in-law, "Pop" Benson. The house is on top of a hill overlooking the station, making it a perfect perch from which to shoot the president. However, it soon becomes clear that the men are not government agents but assassins, led by the ruthless John Baron, who take over the house and hold the family hostage.

Sheriff Tod Shaw arrives with Dan Carney, the Secret Service agent in charge of the president's security detail. When he does, Baron and his gangsters shoot Carney dead and a bullet fractures Shaw's arm. Baron straightens his arm and lets him go to the bedroom where Mrs Benson puts his arm in a sling. All are threatened that Pidge will be shot if they do not keep quiet and Baron boasts about the Silver Star he won in the war for killing a large number of the enemy. He explains that he has nothing against the president but is being paid $500,000 to kill him and money is his only motive. He has already been paid half up-front.

Pop had broken the TV earlier and phoned the TV repair man, Jud, who now arrives and is made to join the others. Baron sends one of his henchmen down to the station to check on the president's schedule, but he arouses the suspicion of the police and is killed in a shootout. Meanwhile, Pop pretends he has heart pains and sends Pidge to look for pills in his dresser. There Pidge sees his grandfather's loaded service revolver and exchanges it for his toy cap gun.

Now the hostages try to appeal to Baron's patriotism, but he makes clear that he has none. But when Baron is confronted by the sheriff on the risks of killing the president, including whether he will ever see his money, Baron's remaining henchman begins to show some reluctance to go through with the assassination. For Baron, however, these are the least of his concerns, and it soon becomes clear that he is a psychopath dismissed from the army for his love of killing.

The assassins have mounted a sniper rifle onto a metal table by the window overlooking the tracks. Jud, under the guise of fixing the TV, discreetly hooks the table up to the 5000-volt plate output of the family television. Pop Benson then intentionally spills a cup of water on the floor beneath the table. Although the hope is that Baron will be shocked and killed in this way, it is his henchman who touches the table first and is electrocuted, reflexively firing the rifle repeatedly and attracting the attention of the agents below. Baron shoots and mortally wounds Jud, disconnects the electrical hook-up and aims the rifle as the president's train arrives, only to see it pass straight through. As Baron gapes in surprise, Ellen Benson grabs the revolver from the top of the dresser and shoots Baron in the abdomen, then Shaw picks up a gun and shoots him a second time. Baron dies appealing for mercy.

Outside the local hospital in the aftermath of the incident, Shaw confirms to Ellen that Jud died. Telling Ellen that he needs to go back to his office, Shaw now makes plans to meet Ellen after church the next day, a proposal she had refused earlier, and they kiss. After she leaves, there is a reprise of the opening scene in which a driver stops to get directions and then asks for the name of the town. When Shaw tells him it is "Suddenly", the driver remarks that "that’s a funny name for a town". As the driver is pulling away, Shaw says to himself, "Oh, I don't know. I don't know about that."

Cast

Frank Sinatra as John Baron
Sterling Hayden as Sheriff Tod Shaw
James Gleason as Peter "Pop" Benson
Nancy Gates as Ellen Benson
Kim Charney as Peter "Pidge" Benson III
Willis Bouchey as Dan Carney, Chief Secret Service Agent
Paul Frees as Benny Conklin (also voice of TV announcer)
Christopher Dark as Bart Wheeler
James O'Hara as Jud Hobson (credited as James Lilburn)
Kem Dibbs as Wilson

Clark Howat as Haggerty
Charles Smith as Bebop
Paul Wexler as Deputy Sheriff Slim Adams
Dan White as Burg
Richard Collier as Ed Hawkins
Roy Engel as first driver
Ted Stanhope as second driver
Charles Wagenheim as Kaplan
John Berardino as trooper

Cast notes

Frank Sinatra's role in Suddenly was the first occasion on which he was cast as a "heavy" in a dramatic film.

The staff reviewer at Variety gave the film a good review and praised the acting. He wrote "[Sinatra] inserts plenty of menace into a psycho character, never too heavily done, and gets good backing from his costar, Sterling Hayden, as sheriff, in a less showy role but just as authoritatively handled. Lewis Allen's direction manages a smart piece where static treatment easily could have prevailed."

The reviewer for Newsweek wrote about Sinatra's performance that he "superbly refutes the idea that the straight-role potentialities which earned an Academy Award for him in From Here to Eternity were one-shot stuff. In Suddenly, the happy-go-lucky soldier of Eternity becomes one of the most repellent killers in American screen history." Moreover, he continued:

<blockquote>The sense of claustrophobia and despair unleashed by the assassins in Suddenly is completely amoral, and totally opposite of the style of harassment found in such non-noir, socially redemptive films as The Desperate Hours [1955]...There are no reasons given, or asked for, regarding the assassination — the entire incident functions as a nightmare, a very real nightmare that invades the serenity of a small town. At the end of the film, it is apparent that the Benson family will never be the same, suddenly scarred by people out of nowhere who irrevocably disrupt their middle-class tranquility.

History

Influence

In 1959, five years after the release of Suddenly, The Manchurian Candidate, a novel written by Richard Condon, a former Hollywood press agent, was published. As with Suddenly, Condon's book features a mentally troubled former war hero who, at the climax of the story, uses a rifle with a scope to shoot at a politician, in the case of the novel, a presidential candidate. The Manchurian Candidate was released as a film in 1962, starring Sinatra, but this time he was trying to prevent an assassination being committed by Laurence Harvey. According to Hollywood legend, Sinatra bought up all remaining copies of Suddenly and had them destroyed, but this was not true. Sinatra also supposedly wanted The Manchurian Candidate – of which he was a producer – withdrawn after the assassination, but its disappearance was caused by its having completed a normal film release schedule.

Loss of copyright

The film's copyright was not renewed and it entered the public domain; it can be downloaded and viewed for free online. Prior to it entering the public domain, the film was widely available from a number of discount/public domain distributors. Suddenly was colorized for home video by Hal Roach Studios in 1986, rendering Sinatra's blue eyes brown. A remastered colorized version by Legend Films was released to DVD on June 16, 2009, which also includes a newly restored print of the original black and white film.

, a film preservationist based in Paris, completely restored the film from a camera negative for Lobster Films, which released it in 2018.

References

Notes

Bibliography