"You were
born in pain," a voiceover announces over the black screen that opens
writer-director-star Allen Baron's 1961 film Blast Of Silence. "You were born with hate and anger
built in," it continues as it becomes clear that this ugly telling of the
film's protagonist's birth accompanies a point-of-view shot of a train emerging
from a tunnel. "Took a slap on the backside to blast out the scream and then
you knew you were alive." That won't be the last time Blast Of Silence draws symbolic power from images
shot on the fly, or finds violence embedded in everyday life.
In a role
intended for Peter Falk, Baron plays Cleveland hitman Frankie Bono, an orphan
who's learned to make a profitable, miserable living as a contract killer.
Traveling to New York during the Christmas season, he's charged with taking out
a mid-level mobster. Stalking his prey as he goes about his daily routine, Bono
gets distracted by an unexpected encounter with a childhood friend whose sister
sees him as a lonely man, not the barely human shell he's become.
Working
with a miniscule budget, Baron creates charged compositions out of found
locations and makes a virtue out of the film's cheapness. The soot and litter
almost seem summoned by his character's mental state. Established admirer
Martin Scorsese could easily have had it in mind when he made Taxi Driver; Blast Of Silence shares that film's tortured
philosophizing. Working under a pseudonym, blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt
provides the beautifully purple second-person narration that puts viewers in
the position of the film's protagonist as he makes his way through a city where
death waits at the first sign of weakness. Or tenderness.
Baron's
background was in painting, illustration, and the occasional acting job, not
filmmaking, but his directorial debut reveals him as a natural behind the
camera. As Herk Harvey's brilliant one-off Carnival Of Souls did with horror, Blast Of Silence brings in all the notes of the noir
genre, but makes them move to its own rhythm. Using the film as a ticket to
Hollywood, Baron might have missed the cheap freedom in his subsequent career
directing episodes of The Brady Bunch and Charlie's Angels.
Key
features: A
60-minute making-of, with extensive Baron interviews from 1990 and 2006, and a
neat partial adaptation by noir-inspired comic-book artist Sean Phillips.