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The casting of Frank Sinatra is thematic, The Manchurian Candidate mainly (Frankenheimer returns the compliment in The Holcroft Covenant) but Allen's Suddenly as well. A spy on his way to Moscow must be eliminated, no agent is uncompromised, the British counter-intelligence operative (Peter Vaughan) remembers a certain American marksman during the war. "We need a bait," the widowed businessman leaves for Leipzig and soon realizes his son has been kidnapped. The contact at the clock shop (Nadia Gray) is a flame long thought extinguished, the East German colonel (Derren Nesbitt) exceeds at his task of making the protagonist "angry enough to kill." A grim reworking of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, so that the assassin's hand the hero spots at the climax is his own. London and Copenhagen figure in the torturous construction, "so damn mysterious," an agent with benefits (Inger Stratton) to send him to jail and a dry diplomat (Edward Fox) to get him out. Multiple glassy planes, dwarfing cityscapes, converging geometric lines—an insistent mise en scène by Sidney J. Furie, whose compositional mannerisms by now have become as recognizable as Reed's Viennese angles. (A coffee pot takes up one third of the screen, a character is framed between the back of a concierge and an arm holding a phone.) The Sinatra swagger purposefully reduced to the clammy dread of "a marionette controlled by strings." ("Our problem is to pull the right one.") Nothing like paternal vengeance to rouse the dormant sniper, a suitcase looms in a hotel room until it opens to reveal a rifle waiting to be put together. "We prefer the picturesque routes." Cruel light comes at the end of a tunnel that might be Hart Crane's, capitalized on by Huston in The Kremlin Letter. With Toby Robins, Cyril Luckham, J.A.B. Dubin-Behrmann, and Michael Newport.
--- Fernando F. Croce |