"Blast of Silence": Not Merry NY Noir

A Hitman's Hate, a cult classic. 1961

For many of us, it is not the season to be jolly. Even for those who celebrate Christmas, there's shopping stress and anxiety about mandatory family reunions. Those who grew up on the Judeo side of the Judeo-Christian tracks may have memories being left out of the "joy." Many others suffer from being SAD, as in seasonal affective disorder: according to the Johns Hopkins website, "Less sunlight and shorter days are thought to be linked to a chemical change in the brain and may be part of the cause of SAD."

And some of us are just sad, because that's our nature.

I've got a movie for us. Blast of Silence, a 1961 low-budget ($200,000) release directed by Allen Baron, is part of the Criterion channel's "Holiday Noir" collection. This tight and efficient, 77 minute, black and white film is about Frank "Frankie" Bono, a professional killer from Cleveland hired to murder a mobster between Christmas and New Year's. It was shot on the streets of New York, bedecked in boughs of holly, troughs of folly.

As the voice-over representing Frankie's thought process says as he cools his heels Christmas Eve at Rockefeller Center, where he is momentarily distracted by the professional Santa Claus: "Time to kill." Emphatically a pun. "Twenty-four hours to stay faceless in the crowd . . . lose yourself in the Christmas spirit with the rest of the suckers."

Allen Baron, writer and director, as Frank Bono. Not quite the Chelsea Hotel: G.G. Allin slept at the Valencia, Third Ave. at St. Mark’s Place

From outside Rockefeller Center to inside the Village Gate, from Harlem ("you hate them, they hate you"), to the then-desolate midtown docks where he picks up his gun and silencer, the cinematography by Merrill S. Brody is a feast for those who love the look of old New York. The Blu-Ray DVD has subtitles/closed captioning and special features including a short film about the making of Blast of Silence; Polaroid stills from the set; another short film from 2008 in which Baron visits the much-changed city sites used in the film; an essay by esteemed critic Terrence Rafferty; and a graphic novel adaptation by Sean Phillips. All of this is free to see by Criterion channel subscribers, and the DVD is available for purchase from Amazon.

There is very little dialogue in the screenplay written by Baron, but the voice-over keeps reeling through your mind. And here is where Blast of Silence gets its existential (and I choose that word with purpose) gravitas. The narration was credited to one Mel Davenport, a pseudonym for the great screenwriter Waldo Salt, blacklisted throughout the 1950s Red Scare. Delivering the narration is the similarly talented but blacklisted character actor Lionel Stander. The voice is nasal, guttural, clearly enunciated East New York. Sometimes it's Frankie's thoughts: "Watch out, Frankie. Danger signal!"

Other times, it's the voice deep inside the head of "Frankie boy," literally from birth: "Remembering out of the black silence, you were born in pain . . . You were born in Hate and anger." It is possible his mother died in childbirth; she is never mentioned again. The father is a harsh, distant memory. Bono was raised in an orphanage, where Christmases were bleak. But he has adapted.

Stander's voice inside Frankie's head: "You're alone. But you don't mind that. You're a loner. And that's the way it should be. . .You've always been alone. You like it that way." He takes the train into a near-empty Grand Central Station, where "Silent Night" is playing. "The railroad company won't let you forget you're coming to town on Christmas. It gives you the creeps."

Other people give him the creeps, and he tries to endure his solitude. He's got to have a few interactions with people who would give anyone the creeps, like Big Ralph (Larry Tucker). Ralph is a bearish, bearded, low-life who helps procure the .38 and silencer Frankie needs for his job. Ralph's small Village apartment is a mess, dominated as it is by cages containing his pet rats. It won't be the last time we see Big Ralph, nor Larry Tucker, who appeared in Sam Fuller's 1963 Shock Corridor, and later, as a writer, was nominated for an Academy Award with Paul Mazursky for Best Original Screenplay for the 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Screen shot of a screen shot. Remind me to memo my art director.

Frankie gets his strength from his solitude and "remembering" the Hate he learned to channel in the orphanage. The key to his success as a hit man is that he learns to Hate his victims. About his target Troiano (played by Peter Clune), we hear him think:

"You know the type: Second-rate syndicate boss with too much ambition. . . And a mustache, to hide the fact that he has lips like a woman. The kind of face you Hate."

The movie's best long scene, to me, is when Frank makes a critical error in his anonymous routine, and inadvertently bumps into Big Ralph at Art D'Lugoff's Village Gate, where Troiano, his girlfriend, and crew, are celebrating the hood’s birthday.

At the Village Gate, there's a hot conga-driven combo led by pianist Bill Chadney. The featured performer is Dean Sheldon, singing two songs with campy beat lyrics, "Dressed in Black" and "Torrid Town." Sheldon looks like he would have been right in the cast of Berlin Babylon. The film’s jazz soundtrack, filled with both nuances and crescendos, is by Meyer Kupferman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence College for many decades, and was a pioneer in 12-tone composition.

Once he reclaimed his own name, Waldo Salt thrived again, winning Oscars for the screenplays for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home.

Lionel Stander, a radio actor since the 1930s and an early target of the House Un-American Activities Committee, famously told HUAC in 1953: "I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or a schmoe." Possibly the longest to be banished from Hollywood under the blacklist, he moved to England in 1964, where Tony Richardson cast him in films such as The Loved One. Moving to Rome, his career bounced back in spaghetti westerns including Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West." Back in the states, he had a recurring role in the hit TV series Hart to Hart.

Art director Charles Rosen rose to the top of his profession in Hollywood, but his credit for that position in Blast of Silence is missing from his IMDB profile.

Allen Baron, the writer and director of Blast of Silence, meant to have his friend Peter Falk play Frank Bono. But Falk had been cast in one of his breakthrough roles, as Abe Reles, in 1960's Murder Inc. So Baron himself played Frank. He directed two other movies: Terror in the City (1964) and Outside In (1972), but worked steadily directing episodes of many TV series.

Molly McCarthy, who plays Lori, the kindly young woman who tries to help Frankie and breaks through his veneer of Hate, appeared in a number of movies, including the 1984 hit The Flamingo Kid.

And Blast of Silence? I've watched it twice this week, and it is an underappreciated classic, maybe the last great black and white American film noir. Unmerry Christmas.