Suddenly Moral Ambiguity.

An assassination attempt on the president of the United States – by Ol’ Blue Eyes!

In a bucolic American town named SUDDENLY, three men posing as FBI take a residential family hostage, using the family’s house as a vantage point to assassinate the president.

Frank Sinatra (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, 1953) is John Baron, the crazy-eyed leader of the three assassins, so rail-thin, his pants are not only too high, they hang about him like pantaloons; his tie is too short and his hat is so rakishly tilted, it gravitationally affected Mercury’s orbit for two months.

Big Sterling Hayden (General “Precious Bodily Fluids” in DR STRANGELOVE, 1964) is Sheriff Tod Shaw, young and imposing, cultivating the town widow Ellen (Nancy Gates) by asking her out to church!

Ellen’s house is overrun by the assassins, as it overlooks the station where the president will disembark. Her loudmouth son “Pidge” and old paw live with her.

This black-and-whiter is a case study in dated moviemaking versus timely message. Made in 1954, the production values, special effects and social mores are all so quaint it makes us vomit in our mouths (theatrical acting, gunshot wounds nonexistent, asking her out to church!), yet the themes and arguments are as impactful today as they were half a century ago.

Though there are small pockets of badly directed action (by Lewis Allen), SUDDENLY is a dialogue-driven movie (written by Richard Sale) with a throbbing social conscience. Strangely, it embraces a nuance that is altogether extinct today: it is actually anti-war and pro-gun!

So though we notice all the glaring annoyances at first (like the terribly looped voices, all the law enforcement with big-balled basso throats, melodramatic acting and pointy bras), by paying attention to the dialogue, we peel away another layer to this seemingly simplistic thriller.

The story itself is predictable – after all, in an American movie no one ever kills the American president (unless it’s Lincoln). Likewise, even though assassin Baron keeps threatening that all-American kid, we know not one hair is going to be harmed on his purty li’l head – but within this predictable story, the arguments presented over war, guns, violence and heroism are surprising. Ellen’s husband died in “the war” so she is pathologically averse to Pidge following his example; she hates Pidge playing with guns. Meanwhile, her paw tries to school her about “dyin’ for your country” and her sheriff beau (Hayden) buys a toy gun for Pidge and tells her, “Guns aren’t necessarily bad – it depends on who uses ’em.”

Baron is an ex-military man, more than once boasting, “I killed 27 people – got a silver star for it” – in other words, though killing people in civilian life might be called murder, killing people in war is called heroism. Baron is constantly rationalizing that killing isn’t bad if done for the right reasons. The fact he is targeting the president is irrelevant. Baron’s character is disconnected from political ideology, to keep his motivations pure mercenary: “Don’t give me that political jazz – it’s not my racket!” So sayeth Ol’ Blue Eyes. SUDDENLY is a treatise on guns and war as instruments of morality. Though released during the Eisenhower administration, movie never mentions who the president is, because presidential policy is not the point of the tale. (Baron even spits an allusion to what would become one of The Who’s signature lines, “Tonight at five o’clock I kill the President. One second after five there’s a new President. What changes? Nothing!” In other words, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss!” – The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again.)

Baron boasts about “control of life and death,” how having a gun “made you kinda God; without the gun I’m nothing, and I never had anything before I got one. First time I got one in my hands and killed a man, I got some self-respect… If I didn’t have a gun, you wouldn’t even spit on me, but because of the gun, you’ll remember me as long as you live!” He’s got a point. Mass murderers (whether they be postal workers, school shooters, army grunts or generals) always get the best press.

The koo-koo message is: war is BAD because it legitimizes murder and sends back some citizens with the humanity trained outa them, but guns are GOOD, because – as Wayne LaPierre would crow in ignorance decades later – the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Unlike today’s vernacular where military service is tantamount to godhood, SUDDENLY gives equal weight to both sides of the argument, simply posing the questions and letting its audience decide: is Ellen’s husband a hero or a chump for “dying for his country”? Is Sheriff a hero just for being in the war? Is Baron a chump for “killing more jerries than any five officers put together”? Sheriff came back to be a sheriff; Baron came back to be a hired killer and Chairman of the Board.

For a ruthless, emotionless killer, Baron sure talks a lot about his emotions. Sheriff even says to Ellen, “We gotta keep this guy talkin’, cos that’s his weakness.” (Baron was a James Bond Villain even before there was such a thing…) Coincidentally, one of his thugs is cartoon voiceover extraordinaire, Paul Frees.

Many dumb plot points hold the film back from becoming a masterpiece, or even a compelling piece of cinema:

• Secret Service so incompetent they don’t scope out the one house that overlooks the railroad station. (It’s like a precursor to the Dealey Plaza book depository fiasco!)
• TV Repairguy is his own universe of redneck backwoods: “What is this? A stickup?” Baron, amused: “Yeah, a stickup!” Repairguy: “You’ll never get away with it!” Did he really just say that? Is this where that pointless line was invented?
• Baron lets Repairguy fix the TV one inch away from his leg while he’s looking through the scope of the assassination rifle, five minutes before downbeat.
• Professional killers Baron and his henchman are fooled by a cap pistol and a real pistol in the hands of the loudmouth kid.
• The climax of stopping the gunman is staged like a community theater rehearsal with lots of tripping and grabbing and a strange absence of soundtrack. It would be comical if it weren’t so cringeworthy. And Ellen, who hates guns, is the one person who has the opportunity to pick up the gun and let Swoonatra have it! Oh, irony, thou overacting mistress!
• We know it’s gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight – as Ellen eventually accepts Sheriff’s invitation to Church! (Disgusting! Send the kids out of the room!)

Before this movie’s release, three sitting United States presidents had been assassinated by gunmen: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901). Nine years after this movie, in November 1963, John F. Kennedy would be assassinated by CIA gunmen.

Influenced by this movie? Or just koo-koo coincidence?…

END

World Without Clue.

A rocketship carrying four men on a recon mission to Mars malfunctions on its return journey, entering a time-warp and landing on Earth 500 years in the future.

WORLD WITHOUT END is one of those classic 1950s space movies that has no clue that it doesn’t have a clue: a rocket shaped like a missile, four explorers inside the rocket, with a few lighted switches on its dashboard to denote “technology,” no atmosphere suits to be seen, guns that never need reloading (guns? We’ll get to that), Mars represented as a red splotch on a viewscreen; instantaneous radio communication between Mars and Earth, and women from the future with the barefoot-kitchen mentality of “broads” from the 1950s.

Starring Hugh Marlowe as the leader of the expedition, with young Aussie up-and-comer Rod Taylor as the sexy beast scientist, and two other freeloaders who are also given backstory to make us care (and we still don’t), all wearing their pants up around their nipples, discover an unbrave new world where cyclopean “mutates” savage the woodland surface of Earth and sophisticates with British accents in shiny polyester pajamas cower underground. It’s H.G. Wells’s Eloi and Morlocks with their environments reversed. And much much stupider.

The unsophisticated lack of imagination in space-faring technology and in conveying a “future” society exactly as a 1950s society (except wearing shiny pajamas and speaking like butlers), we can almost live with. But there are uncountable other elements that have nothing to do with space dialect or future societies. For example, when a big spider puppet obviously made of cloth grabs one of the explorers in its deadly cloth embrace, another explorer puts his gun point blank to the spider’s head facing the gun directly towards his pal on the other side of the spider’s head and fires three times. Of course, only the spider dies, because bullets had no exit wounds in the 1950s. Guns. They’re so safe! Or how about these “scientists,” believing themselves to be on another planet initially, tramping through mountainous woods – trees, bushes, grasses – oblivious to the fact that this organic life is exactly like Earth life, then looking through binoculars and lamenting, “Nothing but forest and brush – no sign of life anywhere!” Not counting the forest and brush, you tools! Also – not an atmosphere suit in sight. Because as LOST IN SPACE taught us, every single planet in the galaxy has breathable air.

And on it goes…. By the time the explorers come upon the underground society, we are ready to hunt down the filmmakers and bitchslap them no matter how old they might be right now. The men of the underground society are just old white Republicans sitting in rooms made of cardboard, enunciating as if on a community theater stage, all wearing “futuristic” shower caps to denote they’re, uh, futuristic. This is the future? Now we really want to slap someone – then the dumb broads appear, in mini-skirts so high we can see vagina, flaxen hair draped over low-cut cleavage, flawless milk-smooth skin, in heels higher than strippers, walking like catwalk models holding vibrating dildoes between their butt cheeks. Future society just went up ten notches. Then those broads open their mouths in that insufferable theatrical flourish and we realize that even 500 years in the future, men have yet to invent an app that would keep that trap shut. We also ponder how these voluptuous hoo-ers could ever pair off with the pajama-doofuses in shower caps. Is She Really Going Out With Him?

So it is no surprise when their female lieges declare openly and guilelessly to each of the explorers, “I love you” merely one day after their meeting. Rod Taylor with his shirt off only exacerbates that Jane Jetson pussy, and gets one of the pajama-doofs jealous enough to frame the explorers, landing them in trouble with the old pajama-leader with the shiniest shower cap. (Why do guys from the 50s and 60s with their shirts off look like they’re holding in their guts? Think: Johnny Weissmuller, Kirk Douglas, etc.)

Even if WORLD WITHOUT END is trying to make some sort of social commentary on violence begetting violence or suspicion begetting violence, or even the presence of weapons begetting violence, all is lost amongst the prosaic methods of conveying the message; the juvenile set design, the pedestrian theatrical acting, enunciating like parrots and using no contractions, everyone facing the fourth wall, the utter lack of authenticity that pervades EVERYTHING, from the explorers dressed in 1950’s pantsuits to the set dressing of the subterranean culture which looks like the 1950’s World Fair idea of “the future” to the fact that the radiation-hammered Earth surface is either the Spahn Ranch or somewhere in Texas.

It’s FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE revisited, with its taken-for-granted misogyny and hubris, with its arrogant stance on mankind possessing the solution to the quandaries of any other intelligent life form (which is usually shoot first, rape later). In trying to purvey itself as “smart” WORLD WITHOUT END ironically comes off as stupider than all the alien races and devolved humans it thumbs its nose at.

END