Blast of Silence: The Christmas Hit-Man Noir

Nearly every crime film that uses voice-over uses the first person. The killer explains himself; the detective takes you into his confidence; the dead man narrates his own postmortem, as in Sunset Boulevard. Blast of Silence does something almost nobody has tried before or since. It narrates in the second person. A voice tells the protagonist what he is thinking, what he was born as, what he is about to do, and it does so in a growl of pure contempt — you were born with hate in you, you like the hate, you are going to do this. The man on screen never answers it. He cannot hear it. He is being narrated at, by something that knows him better than he knows himself, for eighty minutes, and by the end the device has done what no amount of interior monologue could: it has made a professional killer’s inner life audible as a sentence being passed.

The killer is Frankie Bono, from Cleveland, arriving at Penn Station a few days before Christmas with a contract on a mid-level mobster named Troiano. The film’s first shot is a black tunnel with a light at the end and a scream on the soundtrack, which the narrator identifies as birth. Frankie has a week. He needs a gun, and to get one he needs Big Ralph.

Made by one man, more or less

Allen Baron wrote Blast of Silence, directed it, and plays Frankie, having stepped in front of the camera because the actor he wanted was unavailable and the budget could not stretch to a replacement. It was made in New York in 1960 on almost no money, shooting on real pavements without permits, using the city as a free set and its inhabitants as free extras. Universal-International picked it up and released it in 1961, where it did nothing.

The economics are visible in every frame, and they are the film’s greatest asset. Frankie walks. He walks through Harlem, through midtown, along the waterfront, past shop windows dressed for Christmas, and Merrill Brody’s camera goes with him at eye height, in available light, jammed among people who did not know they were in a film. The result is a documentary of New York in December 1960 with a murder plot attached. Whole streets, whole rituals, whole faces are preserved here by accident, because Baron could not afford to build anything.

The voice, and who it belonged to

The narration was written by Waldo Salt, who a decade later would win an Academy Award for Midnight Cowboy and then another for Coming Home, and who in 1960 was blacklisted and unemployable. His credit on the film reads “Mel Davenport” — a name that does not exist. The voice speaking his words belongs to Lionel Stander, a character actor with a growl like a gravel lorry who had also been blacklisted, and who was one of the few people in the business willing to say so out loud.

So the film’s conscience — the voice that judges Frankie, that knows his childhood, that tells him what he is — is two blacklisted men, hidden and unhidden, working for scale on a picture nobody expected to be watched. The savagery in that narration is not a stylistic choice made in a vacuum. Salt is writing about a man who does what he is told for money and tells himself it is professionalism, in a year when the people who had informed on him were still working and he was not.

The mechanics of a small, filthy scene

The film’s best sequence has no violence in it at all. Frankie needs a pistol, so he goes to see Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), an enormous, sweating gun dealer who lives in a squalid flat and keeps rats in cages, feeding them and talking to them while he negotiates. Ralph is delighted to see Frankie. Ralph will not stop talking. Ralph knows more about Frankie’s business than a supplier should, and he starts, gently, jovially, to raise the price.

Tucker plays it as a man who has no idea he is in danger, and Baron plays Frankie as a man doing arithmetic. The scene runs long. The rats keep moving in their cages. Nothing in the staging telegraphs a threat — the room is comic before it is anything else — and the tension comes entirely from the audience being ahead of Ralph and unable to warn him. It is a lesson in how little a low-budget film needs if it has one good room, one good grotesque, and the patience to let a bad idea grow in a man’s head in real time.

The waiting, and what it sounds like

The bulk of the film is surveillance, and Baron shoots it as tedium with a deadline. Frankie has to learn Troiano’s week: where he eats, who he travels with, which door he uses, when he is alone. So he stands. He sits in a parked car. He follows at a distance through crowds who part around him without registering him. There is no montage to compress it, no ticking clock cut in to manufacture urgency, and the film’s argument for its own existence is precisely here — this is what the job is, and the job is mostly a man being bored and unloved in public.

Meyer Kupferman’s score does the work that the images refuse to. It is jittery, brass-forward, jazz that will not settle into a groove, and Baron lets it drop out entirely for long stretches so that the city’s own sound — traffic, footsteps, a shop door — carries the scene. The alternation is the trick. When the music returns it feels like Frankie’s pulse coming back up, and because it is keyed to him rather than to events, you start reading his state off the soundtrack before you can read it off Baron’s face. It is a solution to the central problem of casting a non-actor in the lead, arrived at in the cutting room: if your protagonist cannot show you what he feels, build an apparatus around him that tells you anyway. Between Stander’s voice and Kupferman’s brass, Frankie is the only inexpressive object in a film that is screaming about him from every direction.

The lineage, precisely

Blast of Silence sits in the middle of a three-film line that is the whole minimalist hit-man tradition in embryo.

Before it comes Murder by Contract, Irving Lerner’s 1958 picture with Vince Edwards as a killer who approaches murder as a discipline, all economy and self-improvement, shot for nothing in seven days. After it comes Le Samouraï in 1967, in which Melville takes the same figure, removes the narration entirely, and turns the professional’s ritual into liturgy. Lerner’s killer explains his philosophy; Baron’s is explained to; Melville’s says nothing and lets the raincoat do it.

Martin Scorsese has been explicit about Murder by Contract mattering to him, and the through-line from these films to Taxi Driver is not hard to trace: a lonely man in a rented room, moving through a New York that will not look at him, with a voice on the soundtrack rehearsing a grievance. Baron’s contribution to that inheritance is the specific texture of a city in winter with a man in it who has nobody to spend Christmas with, and the nerve to make the loneliness the subject rather than the atmosphere.

The case against

Baron is not a good actor. He is an adequate one, and there are stretches where Frankie’s blankness is indistinguishable from a director thinking about his next set-up. The subplot with Lori (Molly McCarthy), a woman Frankie knew from the orphanage and re-encounters at a party, is undercooked, and the film’s one attempt at a normal human evening is its weakest passage — partly by design, since Frankie has no idea how to be in a room, and partly because the writing does not know what to do with her either.

There is also the risk in the narration itself. Second person is a stunt. It works here because Stander delivers it like a man kicking a body, and because Salt keeps it in the register of a taunt rather than an explanation. Handed to a gentler voice it would be unbearable.

Where it sits

The film was recovered largely by the Criterion Collection, whose edition includes a documentary tracking Baron back through the New York locations decades later — one of the more affecting supplements on any disc, since the man is walking around his own vanished film. Baron went on to a long career directing television, and never made anything remotely like this again.

Watch it in a double bill with Murder by Contract and you have the entire argument about what a hit-man film can be, made twice, for no money, three years apart. Then watch Le Samouraï and see it turned into art. The Christmas lights, though, belong to Baron alone.

Spoilers below

Frankie kills Big Ralph. Ralph’s greed makes him a witness who is charging rent, and Frankie strangles him in the squalid flat with the rats watching, and the film’s first murder is committed against a supplier rather than a target. It is the moment the professional stops being professional, because a man who kills the person who sold him the gun is a man improvising.

Then the wobble. Frankie asks out. He has seen Lori, he has been to a party, he has stood in a room full of people with lives, and he goes to his employers and tries to give the contract back. They decline. The refusal is administrative and utterly calm: the arrangement exists, the arrangement will be honoured, and the notion that a man in Frankie’s position has an opinion about it is not even insulting to them, merely irrelevant. This is the film’s real thesis arriving. Frankie has spent his life believing his coldness is a choice he made. It is a service he provides, and the moment he tries to withdraw it he discovers he is inventory.

He does the job. Troiano dies. And then Frankie goes to collect, and the meeting is at the water — the marshland out past the airport, mud and reeds and rain — and the men who hired him are waiting to close the account rather than settle it. He is shot down in the mud, in the wet, in the dark, and dies face down in a landscape with nothing in it at all: no city, no lights, no witnesses, no Christmas.

Stander’s voice sees him off. The narration that has spent the film telling Frankie who he was gets the last word on what he was for, and there is no pity in it, because pity was never on offer — the voice told him in the opening shot that he was born screaming into a tunnel and it was right. The man who thought he was a professional was a loose end from the first frame, and the only thing he ever chose was the week in which it got tidied up.