Mystery Wednesday - Suddenly (1954) starring Frank Sinatra

Ok, pop quiz, hotshots! When does Old Blue Eyes not have blue eyes? When the Hal Roach Studios gets ahold of a classic Frank Sinatra gangster movie and decides to colorize it. In doing so, they made the odd decision that Sinatra's eyes should be brown. Off course, this was in the early days of colorization, so honestly there were a lot of colors that weren't very well done, but this seemed a particularly egregious mistake. Fortunately, for those of us who prefer our noir in black and white, it's also available both online and on disk in its original format.

For those who only remember Sinatra from later years when he was best known as a lounge singer or a member of the rat pack, Suddenly may come as quite a surprise. As he had already shown inthe previous year's From Here to Eternity, and would again in 1962 with The Manchurian Candidate , Sinatra was quite the dramatic actor.

In this very dark outing, Sinatra plays a hitman named John Baron who has been hired to kill the (unnamed) American president as he pulls in for a whistle-stop speech in the small California town of  Suddenly. (Yeah, the town is called Suddenly. Because "That's the way things used to happen here." Wanna make something of it?) Weaseling their way into the Benson home by pretending to be FBI agents, Sinatra and his henchmen set about getting ready to put their plan into action. Once the Bensons realise who Baron and his men really are, they attempt to talk them out of the killing, and then Pop Benson (played by James Gleason) tries to sabotage the proceedings. There's also a confrontation with Sheriff Tod Shaw (played by Sterling Hayden) and a real Secret Service agent (Willis Bouchey). But nothing and no-one is going to stop a determined Baron from fulfilling his contract.

The movie, with its true sense of desperation and inevitability is very much in the film noir genre, and Sinatra proves a very creditable lead as the odds mount against him but he remains determined to pull the trigger. not even losing one of his men in a gunfight with the police or the unexpected appearance of a television repairman who quickly becomes a hostage. In a review at the time of the film's release, The Hollywood Reporter stated "As an assassin in the piece, Sinatra superbly refutes the idea that the straight role potentialities in From Here To Eternity was one shot stuff. In Suddenly, the happy-go-lucky soldier of Eternity becomes one of the most repellent killers in American screen history."

Again, as with Mclintock, this is a case where the copyright simply wasn't renewed after the first 28 year period, so the movie fell into the public domain. Some say that one reason the copyright wasn't renewed was that Sinatra (and distributer United Artists) wanted to disassociate himself from it after rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald watched it shortly before he killed President Kennedy.

I wasn't able to find an official trailer online for this film, but here's one apparently created by youtube user publicdomaintheatre that gives a good sense of what the movie is like (though I've got to admit i don't really like the overlay filter):


Ok, time for the skinny:

Title: Suddenly
Release Date: 1954
Running Time 75 min.
Black and White (though colorized versions are available - they're not recommended, but they're available.)
Stars: Frank Sinatra, James Gleason, Sterling Hayden, Nancy Gates
Director: Lewis Allen
Producer: Robert Bassler
Studio: United Artists

You can watch (or download) the movie for free online by clicking here.
It's also available on DVD from Amazon: Suddenly (Yes, this disk includes a colorized version, but it is not the horrendous Hal Roach version - this one is newly remastered and also includes an incredibly sharp (also remastered) b/w version. And yes, Frankie's eyes are blue in this one.)
The movie is also available to "Watch now" from netflix: Suddenly

Until next time, Happy Treasure Hunting
-Professor Damian