Ted Stanhope

The Big Heat -- A melodrama of dice, vice and corruption. Glenn Ford stars as a rogue homicide cop who takes the law into his own hands when he sets out to smash a vicious crime syndicate and in the process finds who planted the car bomb that killed his wife.

High Noon -- A marshall, personally compelled to face a returning deadly enemy, finds that his own town refuses to help him.

Filmdom's legendary gangster Edward G. Robinson ("Little Caesar," "Double Indemnity") is a criminal lawyer who lays his reputation, and life, on the line defending his former assistant against a homicide charge. Starring Nina Foch ("An American in Paris," "The Ten Commandments"), Hugh Marlowe ("All About Eve," "The Birdman of Alcatraz"), and featuring an early appearance by blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield.

Suddenly is the name of the small town invaded by professional assassin Frank Sinatra and his henchmen. Taking a local family hostage, Sinatra sets up a vigil at the second-story window of the family's home. From here, he intends to kill the President of the United States when the latter makes a whistle-stop visit. The film's tension level is enough to induce goose pimples from first scene to last. Sinatra is outstanding as the disgruntled war vet who hopes to become a "somebody" by killing the president. The parallels between his character and Lee Harvey Oswald's are too close for comfort, so much so that Suddenly was withdrawn from local TV packages for several years after the JFK assassination. Sinatra would claim in later years that he himself engineered the removal of Suddenly from general distribution, though in fact he'd lost whatever rights he'd held on the film when it lapsed into public domain. Be sure and miss the notorious colorized version of this black-and-white hriller, wherein Sinatra is transformed into Ol' Brown Eyes. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi