Blast of Silence is a 1961 noir film starring Allen Baron, who also wrote and directed. Baron plays Frankie Bono, a professional hitman, who arrives in New York City to kill a mobster during the Christmas holiday. Solitary and meticulous, Frankie patiently waits for the opportune moment to fulfill his contract; however, a random encounter with an old friend leads him to consider the possibility of a normal life and ends up jeopardizing everything Frankie has achieved.

To call Blast of Silence a crime film would be a disservice to the story. This is a 77 minute existential crisis, a psychologically claustrophobic nightmare, as fatalistic as they come, and the best you can hope for as the viewer who might side with Frankie Bono is that when the hammer falls, it’s quick and painless. And make no mistake about it, the hammer is going to fall on Frankie; only what makes Blast of Silence so interesting is that he isn’t being punished for being a killer, but for allowing himself to feel human. This is, after all, the beginning of the Sixties when the American post-war high was finally crashing down hard, and the idea of the American dream was losing some of its appeal. So when Frankie comes around and decides he finally wants his cut of the dream, it’s no wonder he gets what he gets. Sorry, Frankie, wrong decade, wrong genre.

You know the story and you know where it is going once the pieces are in place. Thanks to the familiar motifs of the genre through countless imitations over the years (it seems our generation is conditioned to understand crime noir instinctively), Blast of Silence almost feels pedestrian. But if you take the time to get past the predictability of the film’s set-up, what you’ll find is enough nihilism and alienation to make Albert Camus blush. The feeling of dread never lets up. This feeling is carried largely by its sublime use of second-person narration, which was written separately by Waldo Salt (screenwriter for Serpico and Midnight Cowboy) and narrated by Lionel Stander. This device – so simple it borders on brilliant – is what sets Blast of Silence apart. Usually a voice-over is an indication of lazy writing, but Salt’s contribution takes a mediocre premise and turns it into a revelation.

Here is a sample of the narration as the film starts; the screen is black with a faint white dot in the center of the screen that progressively gets bigger and bigger:

Remembering, out of the black silence you were born in pain. [Woman screaming] Easy. Easy does it, little mother. We’ve never lost a father. Your job is done, little mother. [Spanking sound followed by a baby crying] You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap on the backside to blast out the scream and then you knew you were alive. Eight pounds, five ounces. Baby boy Frankie Bono. Father doing well. Later you learned to hold back the scream and let out the hate and anger another way.

With this, the camera roars out of a train tunnel and the title flashes across the screen.

As you can see from the screenshots, the cinematography is beautiful. A lot of that has to do with having the story set in New York City. The long shots where Frankie is walking down the street are not only gorgeous for showing off a lifestyle that’s long gone, but for revealing a city that really no longer exists. Blast of Silence is slow, and there are shots that do run longer than needed. I mean, despite how gorgeous those scenes are, there are only so many ways you can watch someone walking down the street. The same goes for the gratuitous scenes with the beatnik band that really does nothing but help age the movie. And the acting feels a little too amateurish at times, especially Larry Tucker’s turn as Big Ralph, who plays the part like a giggling eight year old boy who really wants to tell you the dirty joke he heard at school. Still though, a lot of this is easy to forgive for a movie that is nearly fifty years old.

If the movie were being made today, there is probably enough real story to give you a solid 30 minute show. But that’s the real beauty of it: if it were made today, Blast of Silence would be neutered and weightless, with enough subplots, explosions and romantic entanglements to distract from the real existential uneasiness on display here. Good old Frankie Bono would probably be a socially awkward robot sent from the future to do something nonsensical, like steal the world’s supply of peanut butter (I don’t know about you, but just writing that brought shivers down my spine), and in the process of acquiring all that delicious nutty goodness, he meets a talking turtle who teaches him the importance of peanut butter in the modern world and how to better express his feelings. Naturally, they would end up on a road trip with a lot of product placements and win a video game competition in Las Vegas. David Hasselhoff co-stars as the singing hitchhiker.

And while that movie sounds like a giant pile of awesome, it would never even come close to its original source material.

Whether or not you’re a fan of noir, Blast of Silence is most certainly worth your time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Too Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.