Suddenly
1954 / B & W / 75 minutes
Tagline: A cold-blooded thriller!
A young widow lives with her eight-year-old son and her
father-in-law in the sleepy SoCal burg of Suddenly. Because she lost her
husband in the Korean conflict, she forbids her son from playing with toy guns
and joining the Cub Scouts. Her father-in-law, an ex-Secret Service operative,
speaks out against over-protecting the boy, arguing that if he doesn’t develop
strength of mind, he will be unable to take his turn in fighting cruelty,
hatred, and tyranny and contribute to making the Declaration of Independence
stick. The village sheriff has romantic designs on the widow, but hurts his
case when he buys the boy a cap pistol. A crisis occurs that tests the mettle
of all the characters.
The script is just okay, setting up the paper-thin
characters. Frank Sinatra puts in a convincing performance, here just as
suitably larger than life as his Maggio in From Here to Eternity. He plays a
detestable killer who learns to like killing during WWII. Nancy Gates, who appeared
with Sinatra in Some Came Running, is okay as the pacifist widow. The sheriff is played by hard-nosed Sterling
Hayden, best remembered as the mad general in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
and the hard-bitten copper Michael Corleone shot in the restaurant with
Solozzo. Also good was James Gleason as the father-in-law, mainly because he
gets off cool Americanisms like, “shucks to you,” “tan your hide,” and “hurt
like blazes.”
I suppose a viewer could label this movie a late 1950s
artifact and make the expected allowances. We could identify themes of defending the country against domestic terrorists,
the motivations of betrayal and violence, the different ways that wars
influence individual personalities, the importance in family values, and realistic men controlling idealistic females. We could also see the movie as
simply a concise thriller that compresses four hours of action into a tight
75-minute film.
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