After the death of JFK, Frank Sinatra apparently arranged for The Manchurian Candidate to be pulled from screens because it dealt with an assassination – he also played an assassin ten years before in this United Artists cheapie (which is now in the public domain and thus is easily available).
This starts off quite well – it’s in a quiet town, the president is going to visit, the local cop is Sterling Hayden so you can guess he’s going to save the day. There’s an unpleasant subplot where Hayden’s girlfriend, a widow, won’t let her young son own a gun – Hayden thinks this is a bad idea because everyone has to learn how to operate guns sooner or later. (Of course by the end of the film the widow has come around to this way of thinking.) But it is brisk and is exciting when secret service arrive, and then Sinatra and his goons turn up.
Unfortunately after a while the film bogs down into another Desperate Hours/Petrified Forest retread, with Sinatra and his gang holding Hayden, the widow, the kid and James Gleason hostage. Which isn’t a bad premise but here it isn’t very imaginatively handled, with lots of talking, and Hayden being a smart alek to Sinatra, and the audience unable to help wondering why Sinatra doesn’t just shoot Hayden dead. Then the bug bear of many a 50s thriller – the exploration of the psychology of a killer – comes in to play and we get a lot of talk about Sinatra’s past, and power and blah blah blah. This would have made a neat, taunt hour long anthology drama but it’s too padded out to really work.
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