**SPOILERS*** Hired assassin John Baron, Frank Sinatra, saw just how futile the "hit-Job", that he and his fellow hired killers who were paid up to $500,000.00 each, was to assassinate the President of the United States;"A second after he's shot he'll be replaced by someone else so what's the purpose of killing the President anyway"? <br /><br />The movie "Suddenly is more then just a solid thriller as well as a curiosity piece. It unknowingly and unconsciously foretells a real presidential assassination, JFK, by some nine years after it's release.<br /><br />The way the assassination is depicted planned and put into motion is far more realistic and believable then what the Warran Commission come up with. Instead of one lone nut all by himself with one gun that The Warren Commission came up with the film had a trio of professional killers. Who were hired by an unknown person, or persons, to knock off the president for reasons known only to themselves. Another oddity about the film "Sudddenly" is that it was actually broadcast on the CBS network's "The Early Show" weeks before the assassination of JFK took place in November 1963.<br /><br />With the President of the United States special train due to stop at the town of Suddenly the Secret Service FBI and local policemen get a tip of a possible assassination, that they got from a shot and dying hoodlum. The cops search the building and stores by the railway station to make sure that everything is secure for the president's stopover It also turns out the tip was real; three hired hit men are in town to pay the president a deadly visit. <br /><br />Lead by John Baron the thee, posing as FBI men, take over the home of Pete Benson, a retired Secret Service man, and his widowed daughter Ellen and eight-year-old grandson Pidge, James Gleson Nancy Gates & Kim Charney. The trio shoots both Sheriff Tod Shaw,Sterling Hayden, who was wounded and Secret Service head Don Carney, Willis Bouchey, who died as they came to the door to check things out. It's now just a matter of time for the train to pull up and for them, with Baron as the shooter, to get the president in their cross-hairs. <br /><br />It's between the time that the killers wait for the presidential train to pull up at the station that two of them Benny Conkln & Bart Wheeler,Paul Frees & Christopher Blake, begin to realize what their doing and how the odds are against them to survive and escape from the law; nobody has ever gotten away with killing a President of the United States and they'll be no exception. Only the psycho and insecure Barnon thinks that he can pull this off, even after Benny is shot dead by the Suddenly police, as he cased out the train station less then an hour before the president's train was to arrive. <br /><br />Being on an ego trip more then anything else Baron, despite the police already being tipped off, is determined to get the job done and in the end does a job not only on his co-hit-men but on himself. Chilling as well as entertaining movie with Frank Sinatra at his best as crazed ex-war veteran John Baron who feels that life had dealt him a losing hand and was to even everything up by killing the president and getting away with it at the same time.<br /><br />Sterling Hayden is a bit stiff as the towns Sheriff Tod Shaw and has a hard time convincing the audience, as well as those on the screen, that he's in danger of losing his life even after he was shot. Hayden reads his lines in such a mechanical way that he comes across as if he's a telephone answering machine. <br /><br />Both Nancy Gates and James Gleason as Ellen & Pete Benson are effective as hostages. Ellen's concern for her son and father as well as her fear of guns, Ellen's husband was killed in the Korean War,comes across believable and at the same time unnerving. Since she's forced to use a hated gun to save her and her father together with Pete, James O'Hara, and her son's Pidge lives towards the end of the movie.