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the way, Baron s accomplices are eliminated, but Baron survives. Just as the
train s arrival is imminent, however, Ellen who was previously depicted as
gun-shy seizes the unexpected opportunity to grab a loose revolver. As
Baron is about to shoot the president, Ellen shoots and kills the would-be
assassin, ending the crisis with a dramatic flair.
28 Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics
Although not considered a major picture, Sinatra s casting was enough to
attract the attention of the public and the press. A popular singer with an
enthusiastic following, Sinatra had recently gained Hollywood s notice with
his performance in the award-winning film From Here to Eternity (1953).
The decision to cast him as the villain was against type, but it gave him
the opportunity to demonstrate ample acting abilities in the unflattering
role of Baron. A review in The New York Times commended Sinatra for
playing the leading gunman with an easy, cold, vicious sort of gleam . . . .in a
melodramatic tour de force. 11
The conspiracy element of the film is most thoroughly outlined in the
dialogue that occurs as the hostages attempt to thwart the plot. The discussion
among the characters explains its details. The conspirators, and John Baron,
in particular, are guns for hire, according to the narrative. Baron specifically
claims that he doesn t have a political agenda. In fact, he says he has no idea
why the people who hired him wanted to have the president assassinated.
Money is clearly part of Baron s motive for participating in the plot, but
there is more. When he was in the service, it is revealed, Baron took unusual
pleasure in killing. He derived an exaggerated sense of importance and self-
esteem only when handling a gun. Baron is thus presented as little more than
a very dangerous deviant.
The fact that the motivations of the would-be assassins backers are left
unstated was reason enough for New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther
to temper his assessment of the movie. Although he favorably noted some
parts of the film, he judged that despite the positive aspects, there is not
much substance to the picture no reason is given for the attempt to elim-
inate the president. 12 Crowther added that making a film on the sub-
ject of shooting the President took a certain amount of audacity. A some-
what similar review in Variety, though generally positive, concluded that the
film was slick exploitation with a fantastic plot. 13 Interestingly, despite
the intense anxieties of the period, to these writers and probably to most
American viewers the murder of the president seemed unthinkable. They
could not know, of course, that a decade later the idea would seem all too
possible.
Some of the most telling aspects of Suddenly are its traditional sense of
morality and its strong affirmation of the potency of America and its institu-
tions. Government agents and local law enforcement officials epitomize the
basic decency and goodness of the American people. The audience is given no
reason to suspect that the story will not have a good outcome. The villains,
by contrast, are very deficient. They are portrayed as basically malicious and
greedy cowards. More than that, Baron is shown to be a deranged, amoral
misfit.
Whether intended as realistic dramas or more contrived thrillers and melo-
dramas, films such as these shared a common response to the palpable fear that
was rampant at the height of the McCarthy years. Just as McCarthy and his
The Red Menace and Its Discontents 29
allies suspected seemingly everyone, movies such as these mirrored those para-
noid anxieties. Conniving enemies, it was shown, could be anywhere, from
the metropolis of New York to quaint villages in America s heartland. The
enemy could also be anyone, not only the stranger, the trade unionist, the in-
tellectual, but also the seemingly dutiful civil servant, a young schoolteacher,
a seemingly kindly neighbor, even your own son or daughter. No one was
safe, it was implied. In fact, people were not safe even from themselves.
Yet, the films rationalized that there was an easy set of answers to the
seeming terror: faith, patriotism, vigilance, and, sometimes by implication,
the eschewing of all things foreign or intellectual. It was not an unfamiliar
recipe, playing as it did upon years of stereotypes and folk wisdom that
had already made serious inroads in American motion pictures. In retrospect
it is clear that much of the Hollywood establishment, still in the grip of
the production code s rigorous self-censorship, was eager to demonstrate
its patriotism. Having already been a target of Congressional investigations
and suspicions, the industry was anxious to distance itself from those of its
members who had been linked to communism or socialism.
ANEW GUISE FOR CONSPIRACY UFOS ANDSCIENCE
FICTION MOVIES OF THE 1950S
At the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s, several sensational news
stories of a very different type had made an impact on American culture.
Although at first these seemed unrelated to the communist threat, it was later
realized that public reaction to these reports was deeply connected to the
climate of fear and anxiety that the tense nuclear age heralded. These stories,
which tapped into earlier strands of American popular culture, involved re-
ported sightings of unidentified flying objects, which were sometimes called
flying saucers.
Stories with fantastic, science fiction themes were already established in fic-
tional lore and American popular culture. Nineteenth-century writers helped
create a public appetite for the stories of this type. Jules Verne, for exam-
ple, had success with books such as Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea
(1870), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and From Earth to the Moon
(1865). Somewhat later, H. G. Wells generated much interest with The Time
Machine (1895), Invisible Man (1897), and War of the Worlds (1898). Such
works sometimes provided a basis for screen productions beginning in the
earliest days of narrative filmmaking. As early as 1902, for example, Georges
Méliès s short film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune), loosely based
on the writing of Jules Verne, created a stir among audiences of the still-new
moving picture medium.
Science fiction themes continued to appear in movies off and on in the fol-
lowing decades. On radio, meanwhile, War of the Worlds provided the basis
for the famous 1938 radio play of the same name audaciously produced by
30 Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics
Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air. That broadcast, dealing
with an invasion from Mars, caused a panic among many listeners who failed
to realize that the well-crafted radio play was a fictional story, rather than a
legitimate news account. On screen, Saturday matinees, popular with younger
audiences, featured the serialized exploits of such heroes as space adventurer
Flash Gordon, the futurist hero Buck Rogers, and Superman. Such enter-
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