Critics reviews

Directed by Lewis Allen, Suddenly is a tense and claustrophobic, and sometimes strange experience (and sometimes questionable – there’s a lot to wonder why Baron wouldn’t just kill everyone right away but, apparently, he enjoys an audience) with a crazy-eyed, grinning Frank Sinatra taking over the movie.

It's a solid and taut set-up for a little low-budget crime thriller with a shockingly high body count, but it becomes (as Golden Arm would the next year) a tour de force for Sinatra. The subversive brilliance of the performance (thanks in no small part to Richard Sale's script) lay in how gradually Baron reveals his background and motivations.

It's surely no spoiler to say that Baron's scheme backfires... But the fact that the faulty nature of American suburbia, and especially its electric appliances, provides salvation—much like air pollution does in War of the Worlds—caps the climax of the film's ironic themes. Since human nature is fallible, it follows that objects made by humans are doomed to the same fate, but Suddenly recognizes within this symmetry of error space enough to improvise and innovate.