This is no more than a decent B-movie and you have to wonder how Frank Sinatra ended up in it considering that the year before he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity. a victim of his own success I guess. Sinatra had established himself in serious roles with Meet Danny Wilson and Eternity his two previous films prior to Suddenly. It earned him a lot of film roles and in 1954-1955 he would do Suddenly, The Man with the Golden Arm, Not as a Stranger, the big musical Guys & Dolls and a couple of romantic comedies in Young at Heart and The Tender Trap. Many Film Noir movies were in fact B-movies but this is B-Film Noir. Director Lewis Allen had directed some pretty good films in The Uninvited, So Evil My Love and Desert Fury in the 40's but the quality of his films had dropped off by this time. Screenwriter Richard Sale never had a film of note and did in fact write a lot of bad ones. It's story is a departure from the norm however, being that although there had been three presidential assassinations and a couple of attempts before this film was made it's subject wasn't covered much in film except for Lincoln biographies. This is not a bad film but it's not an especially good one either. Sterling Hayden co-stars. I would give this a 6.5 on a scale of 10.
