In short: Blast of Silence (1961)

Frankie Bono (director Allen Baron) has made his way from an orphanage somewhere in New York into the profession of a contract killer for organized crime working from Cleveland. He’s very good at his job, for he is very good at being alone – or so the hard-boiled second person off-screen narration spoken by Lionel Stander tells him and us, repeatedly. As a matter of fact, Frankie is lonely. Yet the killer is also half out of step with the world around him when it comes to things not concerning being a hitman; at times, he seems barely able to communicate. So his well-oiled killing plans begin to stumble when a job finds him returning to New York at Christmas time and chance or fate push him into having to interact with people. Accidentally, Frankie comes back into contact with Lori (Molly McCarthy), whom he knows and loves from their shared orphanage days, while his local arms dealer Big Ralph (Larry Tucker) gets nosy.

Allen Baron’s independently produced, minimalist crime movie is a little wonder. It was clearly shot on a low budget, Baron solving the typical problems of not having any money or clout for shooting permits by working guerrilla style and with the help of whoever was available or just happened to be in the background of a shot. This is often an approach that saves a movie at least as a time capsule, but Blast of Silence actually suggests a director who was either incredibly lucky with the background scenes he found to shoot, or just very good at finding them. While Frankie’s crime story and his awkward attempts at being a human being go on in the foreground, the film’s backgrounds suggest a wider world, not just one of people going about their lives quite ignorant of the story the movie’s audience is watching, but also one full of slight quirks of the sort that never quite become surreal but breathe the strangeness of life. It’s certainly an effect that parallels elements of the French nouvelle vague, though Baron lacks the tendency to intellectualize his film’s surface, which is pretty much what the nouvelle vague guys would have hoped for from an American. To sound rather French myself, there’s a sense of poetry (of he sort the titular character in Paterson would understand quite well) to the film that seems wholly unconscious, and if it isn’t, Blast of Silence is rather excellent at pretending it is.


Baron does have an eye for the telling detail even when he’s completely staging a scene, however, providing characters with personality and minor quirks that save the minimalist tale from becoming too reduced. Big Ralph’s rats may not outright tell us much about him, but they do suggest things about his character. And apart from the narration, this is a film that lives and breathes suggestions, things Frankie can’t quite put into words – and perhaps even not into thoughts – and which the narrator is ignoring because he is too focused on being hard-boiled and existentialist.