Suddenly Is Right-Frank
Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
Suddenly, starring Frank
Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, 1954, based on a 1943 story Active Duty by Richard Sales who wrote the screenplay, 1954
For my generation, the
generation of ‘68 as one political pundit who I read occasionally called those
of us who were involved in the great counter-cultural wave of the mid to late
1960s, November 22, 1963 the day President Kennedy was assassinated by an
ex-military man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a touchstone in our lives, as December
7, 1941 was for an earlier generation and 9/11 for a later one. Thus the
subject matter of the 1954 film under review, Suddenly, an assassination attempt on the President of the United
States as he passed through by train the Podunk fictional town of Suddenly out
in California was a little shocking. If I had seen the film in 1954 at a time
when I knee-deep, as were many of my fellow film critics, in attending Saturday
afternoon matinee double features I probably would have passed it off as
another great B-film noir effort. And at some level that was my reaction
recently as well but the film brought to the surface more questions than I
would have expected for such an old time film.
The plot-line was like
this if it helps the reader understand my perplexity. In advance of the unnamed
President (although if you go by the original 1943 story the film is based on Active Duty by the screenwriter here Richard
Sales hard it would have been Franklin Delano Roosevelt but by the film’s release
Dwight Eisenhower) heading to some Western mountain retreat the town of
Suddenly was suddenly (I couldn’t resist that, sorry) infested with all kinds
of cops, feds, Secret Service, naturally, state and local cops. The important
one of the latter here is Sherriff Shaw played by gruff he-man type Sterling
Hayden. With all this police action it was fairly easy for a bunch of guys led
by John Baron, played by Frank Sinatra, to pose as FBI agents and gain access
to a primo location at a house across from the railroad station where the
President was expected to stop. That house also just happened to be the home of
Sherriff Shaw’s hoped for paramour, a war widow, her son, and her ex-Secret Service
father.
After a series of ruses
Baron and his boys set up for the ambush in a position in the house and with a
rifle that reminded me of what the situation was like at that 1963 Texas School
Depository. But remember this is 1954 and fiction so that you know that this
plot like many others before and since would be foiled before the dastardly
deed was consummated. Foiled one way or another although not before a senior
Secret Service agent was killed and Sherriff Shaw was wounded and taken hostage
along with his sweetie and her family. The long and short of it was that the
plot was foiled by the heroic action of that son, that paramour, her father and
even the Sheriff. So you can see the film to get the skinny on the how of that.
What is of interest,
beyond the excellent job that Frank Sinatra did of playing an ex-soldier who
learned to love to kill, who gained self-respect and dignity during World War
II when he could freely shoot on sight anything that moved and nobody thought
anything of it and the good job Sterling Hayden did as the Sheriff also an
ex-soldier trying to figure out Baron’s motivation for shooting the President.
Baron was nothing but a flat-out psychopath who had no more feeling about what
he doing and who he was doing it to than the Germans he wasted in the war. I
have seen guys like that, saw them during my own military service, saw them at
the VA hospitals too when they completely broke down. With this caveat in
Baron’s case he was a hired killer, was being paid big money, half a million,
no mean sum back then, by unnamed sources to perform his task and blow the
country. Who was behind it and their motivation didn’t interest him.
In light of all the
controversy surrounding the Kennedy murder by an ex-Marine of unknown psychological
stability and a million theories about whether he acted alone or as part of
greater conspiracy that got me thinking about who might have hired Baron to do
the dastardly deed. That was a matter of some speculation among the hostages in
that ambush house and since it was the post-World War II 1950s and the heart of
the red scare Cold War night the obvious
possibility was the “commies” (although not the Cuban variety since their
revolution was several years away). But that did not end the possibilities. It
could have been some nefarious criminals, the mob, unhappy about their exposure
to public scrutiny. It might have been the military-industrial complex unhappy
about their contracts, or lack of them. It could not have been Lyndon Johnson
since he was not Vice President then but it could have been the sitting Vice
President. You know who I mean in 1954 if you are old enough. Yeah, Richard
Milhous Nixon, later to be a President and a known felon. Don’t tell me he wasn’t
mean and craven enough to order that hit. Don’t be naïve. Watch this film and
develop your own conspiracy theory.
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