Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Suddenly

(1954)

This is the film Frank Sinatra did right after his supporting Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity, and it announced that that film was not a fluke, that he could do more than sing and dance, as in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. He is wonderfully menacing here, as a gangster who has contracted to kill the President in the sleepy little town of Suddenly. (One of the characters say the town is so boring it really ought to be called Gradually.) Sterling Hayden is great as the tough sheriff, Sinatra’s antagonist.