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I never killed a president before
Frank Sinatra is about the only thing Lewis Allen's Suddenly (1954) has going for it, but he's a hell of a thing while he lasts.
I first saw this movie about six years ago when it was still in the public domain; a crisply restored version aired this weekend on TCM's Noir Alley and while its high-key, deep-focus cinematography now looks like deliberate day noir rather than nth-generation washout, the profound fuzziness of its cognitive dissonance remains unalterable and astonishing. Minus Sinatra, Suddenly plays less like a B-movie than an afterschool special. The California nowheresville of the title—so named for the hustle and bustle of its boomtown days, after which, the pre-credits scene informs us with a heavy wink of impending irony, nothing exciting ever happened in this dry-brush whistle-stop again—does not appear to contain a single real human being so much as a bunch of strawman arguments about the Second Amendment, delivered sulkily by nine-year-old Pidge Benson (Kim Charney) whose mother won't let him watch war movies or even play with cap guns like a regular fellow, weakly by pretty, widowed Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), so traumatized by her husband's death in Korea that she'd rather see her boy branded a sissy than grow up to be a soldier, and patriarchally by Sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden), who you can tell the script thinks is the romantic hero because he accosts Ellen in a supermarket and accuses her of "digging a big black pit and shoving all of us down into it" with her selfish refusal to remarry after three whole years; it beams approvingly on the cop's clandestine gift of a toy pistol to the boy who's already picked him out as a father figure because he gets to carry a gun and no one calls him a sissy and when Ellen protests this blatant undermining of her authority, her ex-special-agent father-in-law (James Gleason) sets her straight about the reality of evil and the necessary defense of liberty with a gentle appeal to reason, i.e., "Ellen, will you please stop being a woman?" It is almost programmatically bad. Lines fall out of actors' mouths like cough drops. The cardboard misogyny and NRA hard sell intermittently fail to be lightened by ham-eared attempts at pulp-speak like "Tod, what the Hades is going on in this burg? Did some galoot make a uranium strike?" And just as we're clicking past the twenty-minute mark and my teeth are about to grind themselves through my sinuses, a glossy Chrysler Imperial rolls off the highway with Christopher Dark behind the wheel, Paul Frees in the back seat, and Sinatra riding shotgun, checking his watch with a narrow-eyed grin: "State troopers, right on time . . . Follow me."
He should have played fewer heroes. Johnny Baron isn't even brainwashed Ben Marco of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), trying so hard to be the white knight. He's wire-tight, whip-quick, thin as a burnt ghost, a paid killer who cut his teeth on twenty-seven Germans at Monte Cassino and liked it. He talks too much for his own good and Shaw keeps trying to psychoanalyze him in the blunt-force way that works in social problem films and not in real life, but he almost singlehandedly drags the story into moral complexity. The President of the United States is coming through on a special train at five o'clock on his way to a well-deserved, closely guarded vacation and the town is crawling with all possible levels of security from state troopers to Secret Service. Johnny Baron is here to kill him and not get caught. Toward that end, he has impersonated an FBI agent, shot an acting chief of the Secret Service, and commandeered the Bensons' super-suburban home with its big sofa and its TV on the fritz and its wide-curtained living room window which gives onto a sniper-friendly view of the railyard where the great man will disembark. He has one chance to make the shot. He'll collect half a million dollars for his pains. So far, so un-American. Except that Johnny is doing exactly what his country trained him to do: "I'm no traitor, Sheriff. I won a Silver Star." As the hot Saturday hours tick away on the grandfather clock in the hall, we learn that Johnny was born into violence and poverty, the illegitimate son of a pair of "dipsos" who drank themselves to death before he could kill them as he had once sworn to, a neglected, abused child left in a state home; turned out on the streets, he had nightmares of drowning in the crowd whose faces were "all me—and all nothing." The war was his salvation; his country gave him a gun and he learned his gift was for killing and it rewarded him for killing more and more, always more brutally, until one day he killed someone he hadn't been drafted to and was section-eighted home, a nicety he still doesn't understand. A civilian again, this time he had something to keep him from drowning—that gift from the U.S. Army—and he worked his way up the food chain of the underworld with it until he became the first person you call when you want a president shot. He takes the honor seriously; it's business, not ideology. "I'm no actor, busting my leg on a stage so I can yell 'Down with the tyrants!'" He's twitchy, but he's not crazy, at least not in the unstable trigger-junkie way the other characters mean when they try to make the word sting; he is merely so deeply damaged you might as well call him a sociopath because scar tissue isn't a code in the DSM. As he casually disarms her of the kitchen knife she was just starting to think about holding, Ellen flares, "Haven't you any feelings at all?" and Johnny's not even sneering when he answers, "No, I haven't, lady. They were taken out of me by experts. Feeling's a trap. Show me a guy with feelings and I'll show you a sucker. It's a weakness. Makes you think of something besides yourself. If I had any feelings left in me at all, they'd be for me. Just me." He doesn't even know who's paying him and he doesn't care.
And so he's a contradiction the film doesn't seem to know it's written itself into, the reason it's live and dangerous whenever he's onscreen and a headbanging chunk of Eisenhower-era propaganda when he's not. Over and over, the dialogue bludgeons the audience with the far too familiar idea that the only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with another gun—or a good woman, once she overcomes her foolish feminine qualms about the sensibility of keeping loaded firearms in unlocked drawers—encouraging us to cheer on Pidge's God-given right to carry a gun like all good American boys, but Baron is just as American and when Johnny got his gun, America got a sniper's sights on its president's head a dozen years later. We're supposed to think of bluff, law-enforcing, brave-even-with-a-broken-arm Shaw as Pidge's future, but what if it's Johnny, scarred and wired, smiling behind the scope of a Gewehr 43 as the train comes hurtling into Suddenly's depot? (The film can't know it, but that plucky moppet's just about the right age for a land war in Asia if he follows his father's calling—"blown to bits on some godforsaken battlefield thousands of miles from where he was born.") I genuinely can't tell if the film knows what it's done. It is otherwise so badgeringly insistent on disproving Ellen's pacifist convictions, it seems impossible it should have the self-awareness. I mean, this is a movie whose heroic climax turns on Pidge's successful substitution of his grandfather's old service revolver for his similar-looking six-shooter cap pistol—exactly the trajectory that his mother always feared for her child, only the joke's on her, it's life-saving. Once she's shot a man with it, the sheriff can even take her to church, completing the God-fearing, gun-toting circle of white American heteronormativity. The family that stands its ground together, etc. And yet there's still Johnny Baron, the equally all-American specter of government-issue amorality, shrugging off the idea that his successful act of assassination will alter anything except his bank balance in the long run: "The laugh is on the guys who're paying the freight. All this loot and they don't even know what they're doing. A half a million clams for absolutely nothing—because tonight at five o'clock I kill the president, one second after five there's a new president. What changes? Nothing. What are they paying for? Nothing." I can't tell if he's the most cynical or the most idealistic of them all.
So that's Suddenly. So long as it's following Sinatra, it's as morally complicated as film noir calls for and as gripping as a home invasion assassination thriller ought to be, even if you can pretty much bet that in 1954 this story won't end with a cute kid's throat cut or a bullet through the president's head. Whenever it looks away from him, I just want to go listen to the original cast of Sondheim's Assassins (1991) or something. Richard Sales adapted the screenplay from his 1943 short story "Active Duty" and I am considering tracking it down just to see whether the wartime setting ameliorates either the cognitive dissonance or the misogyny. Barring some fourth-wall-breaking shots of Sinatra, Charles G. Clarke's photography tends toward the cleanly lensed rather than the inspiringly shadowed, but it proves that you can shoot a noir without a night scene, provided the sun beats down on something unsettling enough. Most of the cast honestly appear to be phoning it in, but I enjoyed seeing rather than just hearing Paul Frees as a solid, unflamboyant accomplice who gets a nice unexpected chase scene in the third act (and then an uncredited return as a TV announcer, because otherwise what's the point of casting Paul Frees). Recommend me some more uncharming Sinatra, please. I warmed to his Nathan Detroit eventually, but I think I like him best when I'm not sure if he's about to shoot someone in the face. This expertise brought to you by my feeling backers at Patreon.
I first saw this movie about six years ago when it was still in the public domain; a crisply restored version aired this weekend on TCM's Noir Alley and while its high-key, deep-focus cinematography now looks like deliberate day noir rather than nth-generation washout, the profound fuzziness of its cognitive dissonance remains unalterable and astonishing. Minus Sinatra, Suddenly plays less like a B-movie than an afterschool special. The California nowheresville of the title—so named for the hustle and bustle of its boomtown days, after which, the pre-credits scene informs us with a heavy wink of impending irony, nothing exciting ever happened in this dry-brush whistle-stop again—does not appear to contain a single real human being so much as a bunch of strawman arguments about the Second Amendment, delivered sulkily by nine-year-old Pidge Benson (Kim Charney) whose mother won't let him watch war movies or even play with cap guns like a regular fellow, weakly by pretty, widowed Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), so traumatized by her husband's death in Korea that she'd rather see her boy branded a sissy than grow up to be a soldier, and patriarchally by Sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden), who you can tell the script thinks is the romantic hero because he accosts Ellen in a supermarket and accuses her of "digging a big black pit and shoving all of us down into it" with her selfish refusal to remarry after three whole years; it beams approvingly on the cop's clandestine gift of a toy pistol to the boy who's already picked him out as a father figure because he gets to carry a gun and no one calls him a sissy and when Ellen protests this blatant undermining of her authority, her ex-special-agent father-in-law (James Gleason) sets her straight about the reality of evil and the necessary defense of liberty with a gentle appeal to reason, i.e., "Ellen, will you please stop being a woman?" It is almost programmatically bad. Lines fall out of actors' mouths like cough drops. The cardboard misogyny and NRA hard sell intermittently fail to be lightened by ham-eared attempts at pulp-speak like "Tod, what the Hades is going on in this burg? Did some galoot make a uranium strike?" And just as we're clicking past the twenty-minute mark and my teeth are about to grind themselves through my sinuses, a glossy Chrysler Imperial rolls off the highway with Christopher Dark behind the wheel, Paul Frees in the back seat, and Sinatra riding shotgun, checking his watch with a narrow-eyed grin: "State troopers, right on time . . . Follow me."
He should have played fewer heroes. Johnny Baron isn't even brainwashed Ben Marco of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), trying so hard to be the white knight. He's wire-tight, whip-quick, thin as a burnt ghost, a paid killer who cut his teeth on twenty-seven Germans at Monte Cassino and liked it. He talks too much for his own good and Shaw keeps trying to psychoanalyze him in the blunt-force way that works in social problem films and not in real life, but he almost singlehandedly drags the story into moral complexity. The President of the United States is coming through on a special train at five o'clock on his way to a well-deserved, closely guarded vacation and the town is crawling with all possible levels of security from state troopers to Secret Service. Johnny Baron is here to kill him and not get caught. Toward that end, he has impersonated an FBI agent, shot an acting chief of the Secret Service, and commandeered the Bensons' super-suburban home with its big sofa and its TV on the fritz and its wide-curtained living room window which gives onto a sniper-friendly view of the railyard where the great man will disembark. He has one chance to make the shot. He'll collect half a million dollars for his pains. So far, so un-American. Except that Johnny is doing exactly what his country trained him to do: "I'm no traitor, Sheriff. I won a Silver Star." As the hot Saturday hours tick away on the grandfather clock in the hall, we learn that Johnny was born into violence and poverty, the illegitimate son of a pair of "dipsos" who drank themselves to death before he could kill them as he had once sworn to, a neglected, abused child left in a state home; turned out on the streets, he had nightmares of drowning in the crowd whose faces were "all me—and all nothing." The war was his salvation; his country gave him a gun and he learned his gift was for killing and it rewarded him for killing more and more, always more brutally, until one day he killed someone he hadn't been drafted to and was section-eighted home, a nicety he still doesn't understand. A civilian again, this time he had something to keep him from drowning—that gift from the U.S. Army—and he worked his way up the food chain of the underworld with it until he became the first person you call when you want a president shot. He takes the honor seriously; it's business, not ideology. "I'm no actor, busting my leg on a stage so I can yell 'Down with the tyrants!'" He's twitchy, but he's not crazy, at least not in the unstable trigger-junkie way the other characters mean when they try to make the word sting; he is merely so deeply damaged you might as well call him a sociopath because scar tissue isn't a code in the DSM. As he casually disarms her of the kitchen knife she was just starting to think about holding, Ellen flares, "Haven't you any feelings at all?" and Johnny's not even sneering when he answers, "No, I haven't, lady. They were taken out of me by experts. Feeling's a trap. Show me a guy with feelings and I'll show you a sucker. It's a weakness. Makes you think of something besides yourself. If I had any feelings left in me at all, they'd be for me. Just me." He doesn't even know who's paying him and he doesn't care.
And so he's a contradiction the film doesn't seem to know it's written itself into, the reason it's live and dangerous whenever he's onscreen and a headbanging chunk of Eisenhower-era propaganda when he's not. Over and over, the dialogue bludgeons the audience with the far too familiar idea that the only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with another gun—or a good woman, once she overcomes her foolish feminine qualms about the sensibility of keeping loaded firearms in unlocked drawers—encouraging us to cheer on Pidge's God-given right to carry a gun like all good American boys, but Baron is just as American and when Johnny got his gun, America got a sniper's sights on its president's head a dozen years later. We're supposed to think of bluff, law-enforcing, brave-even-with-a-broken-arm Shaw as Pidge's future, but what if it's Johnny, scarred and wired, smiling behind the scope of a Gewehr 43 as the train comes hurtling into Suddenly's depot? (The film can't know it, but that plucky moppet's just about the right age for a land war in Asia if he follows his father's calling—"blown to bits on some godforsaken battlefield thousands of miles from where he was born.") I genuinely can't tell if the film knows what it's done. It is otherwise so badgeringly insistent on disproving Ellen's pacifist convictions, it seems impossible it should have the self-awareness. I mean, this is a movie whose heroic climax turns on Pidge's successful substitution of his grandfather's old service revolver for his similar-looking six-shooter cap pistol—exactly the trajectory that his mother always feared for her child, only the joke's on her, it's life-saving. Once she's shot a man with it, the sheriff can even take her to church, completing the God-fearing, gun-toting circle of white American heteronormativity. The family that stands its ground together, etc. And yet there's still Johnny Baron, the equally all-American specter of government-issue amorality, shrugging off the idea that his successful act of assassination will alter anything except his bank balance in the long run: "The laugh is on the guys who're paying the freight. All this loot and they don't even know what they're doing. A half a million clams for absolutely nothing—because tonight at five o'clock I kill the president, one second after five there's a new president. What changes? Nothing. What are they paying for? Nothing." I can't tell if he's the most cynical or the most idealistic of them all.
So that's Suddenly. So long as it's following Sinatra, it's as morally complicated as film noir calls for and as gripping as a home invasion assassination thriller ought to be, even if you can pretty much bet that in 1954 this story won't end with a cute kid's throat cut or a bullet through the president's head. Whenever it looks away from him, I just want to go listen to the original cast of Sondheim's Assassins (1991) or something. Richard Sales adapted the screenplay from his 1943 short story "Active Duty" and I am considering tracking it down just to see whether the wartime setting ameliorates either the cognitive dissonance or the misogyny. Barring some fourth-wall-breaking shots of Sinatra, Charles G. Clarke's photography tends toward the cleanly lensed rather than the inspiringly shadowed, but it proves that you can shoot a noir without a night scene, provided the sun beats down on something unsettling enough. Most of the cast honestly appear to be phoning it in, but I enjoyed seeing rather than just hearing Paul Frees as a solid, unflamboyant accomplice who gets a nice unexpected chase scene in the third act (and then an uncredited return as a TV announcer, because otherwise what's the point of casting Paul Frees). Recommend me some more uncharming Sinatra, please. I warmed to his Nathan Detroit eventually, but I think I like him best when I'm not sure if he's about to shoot someone in the face. This expertise brought to you by my feeling backers at Patreon.
no subject
I like them both very much as actors! They've just got nothing to work with here: Lawful Good at its PCA blandest. Well, I needed to see The Asphalt Jungle anyway.
The Man With the Golden Arm is probably my favorite uncharming Sinatra film.
Next time it comes around on TCM, I'll watch it.