Suddenly (1954)

The President of the United States passes through a small town and a band of gangsters, covering as FBI agents, plots to murder him, using a local home as a hiding place and set-up for the assassination. The local family consists of a mother and her son and grandpa who served in the war. The mother is courted by a police officer but his advances have not been welcomed. Frank Sinatra plays the leading gangster, a psychopath with no particular aims in mind, and I guess his part saves this film, which otherwise does not have much speaking for it. It tries to build up tension as the story is mostly limited to the four walls of the family home under siege by the gangsters but neither the plot nor the acting pulls it off. One theme in the film developed early on is the mother's reluctance to let her small kid handle a gun. In the last scene, we see the mother herself firing a rifle and killing a man. I'm not sure what the intended message is supposed to be: guns are good when used as self-protection, and self-protection is sometimes unavoidable?