Blast of Silence 1961 Universal-International (77 minutes) written, directed and starring Allen Baron.
This low budget film noir made early in the rainbow dawn of the 1960s is an odd Meadowlands duck à l’orange basted with mood, roasted in atmosphere, and served cold.
The story is simple: Frankie Bono (Allen Baron), a middle-aged professional sociopath from Cleveland, travels to the New York metropolitan area to do a contract hit for the Mob on one of its own, a certain ‘Troiano’, during the Christmas holidays. Such schemes seldom turn out as planned—in life or the movies. This one is no different.
While waiting for a venal middleman named ‘Big Ralph’ (Larry Tucker), to procure his silenced pistol for the job, Frankie coincidentally runs into Petey (Danny Meehan), with whom he grew up in an orphanage, and Petey’s sister, Lori (Molly McCarthy), who was Frankie’s school-age girlfriend. These characters feed and water Frankie’s paranoia and complicate the plot, but they do not compromise the job: they have no idea what business he is in, much less that he spends his days talking to himself in a monotone, shadowing a mobster so that he can pick the best time and place to kill him.
This movie does not have in the dramatic studio lighting and veteran contract players and direction of the classic B movies that the major studios produced in the 1940s and early 1950s. But it more than makes up for this in inventive camera angles and a stylized, hardboiled existential dead-end atmosphere. In this, director Allen Baron came away from the American and French film noir classics with the same things as the French New Wave directors. So it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
However, Baron does not just tell a story in pictures. His camera distorts space like a funhouse mirror—space, but not its subjects. It looks up and down at characters, it lies flat on the sidewalk looking up inclined streets and makes them tower like mountains, and it does a kind of visual salmon-leap up and down narrow stairways and through lateral space.
He also builds his shots nicely. It would be impossible for a wall-mounted fire axe prominently framed in a shot not to end up getting used—and not for a fire. And there is something disconcerting and spooky about seeing a Teddy bear with black rings around its eyes suddenly bouncing up a staircase upside down when there someone with a silenced pistol waiting in the shadows above—nearly as foreboding as seeing the helium bear balloon caught in an overhead telephone line in Fritz Lang’s M.
Baron creates atmosphere in images of The City and a paranoid, fatalist, second-person singular voiceover that on the one hand sounds way too arty to be real, yet in which one can recognize the voice of those of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who never really made it all the way back from The War. The voiceover at times sounds like what could be a man of that generation talking in his sleep. Of course, men of that generation wrote these films.
But Frankie is one of the characters one would see only in the background of The Godfather or one of the Mafia epics that followed; it is even more likely that he would be just a trench-coated shoulder, the lowered brim of a hat and a gloved hand wielding a pistol or sap. He may be closer to what people in this world really are like, but his character is not colorful or charismatic enough for a big role in one of those later films—he has no bada-bing and could care less about the cannolis.
Yet the later movies are set in this time and place, and the canvas is the same. Frankie comes into Newark on the train; he meets a contact on the Staten Island Ferry; he drives in and out of Manhattan across the New Jersey Meadowlands on Pulaski Skyway. He follows Troiano to his suburban home—what he calls ‘a nice little home, quiet suburban community, an hour out in the suburbs,’ which easily could be Tony Soprano’s Caldwell, N.J. The last lyric sequence of shots, like something straight out of a Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movie, occurs on an overcast, windy day in a place that looks a lot like the Hackensack River in the Meadowlands—that ideal place for sleeping with the fishes (but evidently it was shot on Long Island).
In this movie, The City is the main malevolent character—The City as Gomorrah. ‘You come into the city by dark whatever time of day it is,’ the voiceover growls in the beginning. The City here is mostly but not always an overcast or nighttime midtown Manhattan, with a little Harlem and the Chelsea docks and the West Village thrown in, and what looks and feels like parts of downtown Newark.
The War may have informed the nature of the men of film noir, but here it is The City that has annealed Frankie, the little we find out about him besides his existential outlook in the voiceover. It is a place where a greasy sensualist obtains a silenced pistol for a contract killer and keeps sewer rats in cages in a seedy prepaid room hidden from view by a nicotine-stained roll-up blind, where gangsters whose families live in the lily-white suburbs keep their girlfriends, where bad people like Frankie come to do worse things.
It’s all atmosphere.
On the other hand, we see the magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from Fifth Avenue, a series of splendid Fifth Avenue windows turned out in full holiday dress, and some of midtown Manhattan’s distinct landmarks at night, like Lever House and the Seagram’s Building.
In fact, if you rub your eyes and take a long back step into the daylight, all the pulp fiction turns out to be just a city in the eyes of a morbidly self-absorbed beholder.
After all, fresh-faced Petey and Lori live in the city. Who’s to say that the cleaning lady in the train station isn’t putting a son or daughter through college, or that the singer in the Village Gate (Dean Sheldon) accompanying himself on the bongos and singing ‘Dressed in Black all the Time’ and ‘Torrid Town’ isn’t an up-and-coming Tommy Smothers? Couldn’t the men and women we see darkly through Frankie’s narrowed glance just be you or me or someone we know on no more fraught a mission than going to lunch or picking up the dry cleaning on the way home from work?
Best to suspend disbelief, enjoy the pulp rococo, and watch the things Baron does with a camera.
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