Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron) (Patreon)

52/100

Context is everything, or nearly so. I recently (re)watched a film, made roughly around the same time as this one (six years earlier), that's likewise a formulaic hard-boiled crime story shot on location in New York City (when that was still relatively uncommon) for virtually no money. Acting's arguably a bit weaker in that mid-'50s picture, but the direction's markedly stronger; to my mind, there's no question regarding which of the two looks more impressive today. Yet it's easier to get excited about Blast of Silence, because Allen Baron did not go on to make Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon and etc. Compared to those canonical masterpieces, Killer's Kiss seems downright piddly, registering as mere juvenilia. Blast of Silence, by contrast, gets to represent a career that never quite happened, and so benefits from a certain wistful romanticism. Does it show promise? Definitely. Would it be in the Criterion Collection* had Baron later achieved near-Kubrickian heights? That I highly doubt.

Certainly there's not a whole lot to Blast from a narrative standpoint. A hitman and congenital loner named Frankie Bono (ably inhabited by Baron, who sometimes reminded me of the young George C. Scott and sometimes reminded me of Kevin Pollak struggling to play it tough in The Usual Suspects) takes a Job that he eventually, after falling for an old friend's sister, decides will be his One Last, which proves to be not so easy. Very basic stuff, enlivened here only by a few outré touches like one supporting hoodlum's beloved pet rats. Nothing about the abortive romance compels, and Frankie's prep work for the hit somehow takes up a fair bit of screen time despite  consisting entirely of (a) acquiring a gun (if kiling people is your profession, don't you have a bunch of untraceable pistols at the ready, rather than seeking one out afresh for each assignment?) and (b) following the target around to find out when he's not surrounded by bodyguards. Fincher-style obsessive meticulousness this ain't. (Never fear, Blasters, I'll get to what it sometimes is instead.) The film's finale is especially predictable, to the point where it's quite difficult to believe that Frankie couldn't see what was coming. PRO TIP: After angering your employers by committing an unsanctioned murder and then trying to renege on your contract, do not agree to collect payment at some forlorn hurricane-pounded location in the middle of fucking nowhere (and on the water!).

What Blast lacks in plot and characterization (and budget), it compensates for to some degree with moody atmosphere. I feel confident in asserting that the film is remembered today primarily thanks to its fatalistic second-person narration, beautifully written by "Mel Davenport" (I was both surprised and not a bit surprised to discover afterward that Mel is really Waldo Salt, still on the fucking blacklist) and spoken in the terminally raspy timbre of Lionel Stander (which, because I grew up in the '80s, kept making me flash back to "By the way, my name is Max. I take care of both of them. Which ain't easy. 'Cause when they met...it was murder!", but I don't hold that goofy infelicity against the movie). Standard first-person narration would likely have felt like masking tape; by addressing the protagonist, rather than us, Salt manages to add psychological and philosophical heft while mostly disguising how much of a desperate afterthought those elements were. Plus we get a hefty helping of Yuletide cynicism. "Time to kill. 24 hours to stay faceless in the crowd. Get yourself lost in the city. Lose yourself in the Christmas spirit with the rest of the suckers." Like a lot of no-budget films, Blast of Silence indulges in a great many tracking shots that serve mostly to use New York City as ready-made production value while, well, killing time; as in Killer's Kiss, I was quite happy to look past the actors and get a gander at mid-century Manhattan. (Fun fact: In this shot of MacDougal Street—there's Cafe Reggio, which is how I can be sure—the dog is looking toward what I'm fairly certain is now the entrance to the Comedy Cellar, which Louis C.K. walked down at the beginning of every Louis episode.) 

So there's a fair bit of retroactively fascinating location footage, and that dryly poetic narration, and an evocative jazz score by one Meyer Kupferman (apparently his sole work for the screen). And collectively they do elevate what would otherwise be a wholly forgettable curio by someone who wound up working primarily in episodic television. But they don't elevate it that much. Maybe I'd think higher of it had I not happened to rewatch Killer's Kiss so recently. Now that's promising.

* I'd forgotten that a Criterion Blu of this film was forthcoming, and would have postponed watching had I remembered; the disc is almost certainly waiting for me back at my house (or technically at the post office, since my mail delivery is on hold). But it looked fine on the Channel.