Suddenly

While not great art, Suddenly is great crackerjack crime-thriller junk food. Taking place in a sleepy ideal of a small town, Suddenly finds a family held hostage by a group of killers intent on assassinating the president. Slightly hysterical in its mania of pro-Cold War/pro-gun messages, a typically bit of rah-rah anti-Communist sentiment of the era, Suddenly mostly works as a thriller played out in real-time.

Sterling Hayden stars as the sheriff who is romantically entangled with a war widow (Nancy Gates). Gates lives with her son (Kim Charney) and elderly father (James Gleason), her anxiety around guns and violence, due to her husband being killed in the war, are understandable, so they’re naturally going to change over time to keeping up appearances.

No matter if I disagree with the politics on display, Suddenly is a great showcase for Frank Sinatra’s considerable acting talents. Fresh off of his Oscar win for From Here to Eternity, Sinatra goes deep inside of the cracked psyche of this killer. He’s still hungry to prove his worth as more than a song-and-dance man, and he delivers large passages of existential dialog extremely well. He barges into the suburban home with a ruthlessness than soon dissolves into paranoid fits as the captured characters get under his skin. At the end, once his plan has fallen apart (which should be no spoiler), Sinatra’s entire being, which up to this point had been wrapped up in his belief in artillery, shatters.

Questionable politics aside, these ideals and story beats are found everywhere during the era, Suddenly works best as pure adrenaline thrill-ride. Taking place almost entirely in the suburban home, the film finds various ways to keep the tension and pace going at quick pace. Much of this success belongs to Sinatra’s life-giving performance. The rest of the cast doesn’t bother keeping up the pace, not that any of them are bad. Most of them are fine, with Hayden turning in particularly fine work with his uniquely droll delivery and tough-guy act. Just ignore most of the script issues and watch Sinatra tear into his villainous and cowardly character with aplomb.