Murder by Contract (1958, Irving Lerner) (Patreon)

63/100

Spoilers ahoy.

A remarkable 80-minute journey from "What the fuck is this?" to "Is that all there is?" (Then let's keep dancing.) Vince Edwards makes a truly riveting amoral automaton, and the film's budgetary limitations work in its favor, for a while, creating an eerily underpopulated universe that feels dissociated from virtually every other Hollywood film of that era. I kept thinking of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, even though this guy is technically more akin to e.g. Michael Shannon's "Iceman" (for the four of you who remember that one); there's a similarly grim singularity of purpose, along with the chilling sensation that ordinary societal rules simply don't apply—to the film itself, not merely to the protagonist. Watched in dumbstruck awe as Claude badasses his way up the criminal food chain, intensely curious about what impediment, if any, a man this coldly, hypnotically self-serving would eventually encounter. "A woman," you could have informed me, and "Of course," I'd have replied...but I wouldn't have expected something so disappointingly banal as chivalry not quite being dead. To the extent that Murder by Contract is a character study of an antihero, it's ultimately a pretty meager one, apart from Edwards' blunt charisma; as a narrative, its focus on just one hit, and Claude's convoluted preparations for same (over the course of three separate attempts), makes it play like a heist movie that substitutes death for theft. Nothing wrong with that, to be sure, but this movie starts out as such an electrifying whatsit that I felt a tad let down by where it ends up, which amounts to the hypothetical tagline HE COULD KILL ANYONE...EXCEPT A DAME*. "The material is thin," Kael wrote, "but it has been worked out in visual terms, and the movie is often taut and exciting." That seems right on the money to me: a sleeper well worth checking out, but hardly a lost classic. Sorry, Marty.

* Yeah, he tries to kill her twice (and does in fact mistakenly kill a policewoman), but the idea seems to be that he can only do so remotely. Up close, he's unable to dehumanize a woman, and freezes. Wish there'd been more to his insistence that women, unlike men, are inherently unpredictable and thus more difficult to kill, requiring him to increase his fee accordingly; I suppose one could argue that her continuing to play the piano rather than turning and fighting him off qualifies, but that's not really how his climactic demise unfolds. Lerner's choice to end on a perfunctory shootout doesn't help.