Blast of Silence

What a sad little micro classic, here.  A late period noir that got under my skin in the way that, in fact, few noirs have.  1961's BLAST OF SILENCE is all about loneliness, with omniscient second person narration making it all the more crushing.  As if God were describing one of His poor creations, one who took his free will and erected a wasted life.  Stories of hit men don't always probe as deeply.  I'm often wary of voice over to state the obvious and spoon feed the less swift in the audience, but in this film it allows a real understanding of a wisp of a man.  A flickering shadow.

His name is Frankie Bono.  He's back in his hometown, NYC,  for a job.  The mark: a mobster.  Frankie knows how to do it.  Too bad he has contacts to meet, like a slovenly, oily gun dealer named Big Ralph (Larry Tucker, highly entertaining), who keeps sewer rats as pets in his disgrace of an apartment.  Too bad also that it's Christmastime.  You hate Christmas, the narrator tells us, and Frankie.

He finds has some time to kill, and a childhood friend from the orphanage named Petey (Danny Meehan) finds him in a restaurant nursing a drink.  Alone, of course, the way he likes it.  Frankie is resistant to an invite to a Christmas Eve party.  He relents, and there finds an old girlfriend named Lori (Molly McCarthy) who notes the sad wallflower on the coach, away from the revelers.  "I don't mix well," he tells her.  But she invites him to her place the following night, perhaps feeling sorry for him.  He still don't mix well.

With anyone, as we'll discover in this no shots wasted seventy seven minute feature.  BLAST OF SILENCE takes its no budget and captures the City as well as anything of its time.  The lights of the holiday are vivid reminders of Frankie's outsider status.  Beacons of bad memories.  Writer/director Allen Baron also plays the lead, and his tour-de-force work went sadly underappreciated.  Hopefully the Criterion release of this movie has changed that a bit.  This is truly a film worth seeking out.

While Lionel Stander's voice work unavoidably reminded me of his later bit during the opening credits of the T.V show Hart to Hart ("When they met, it was MER-DER!"), it was always appropriately direct and effective.  Never too gruff or hip.  Unique too, that style.  Baron knew it was the perfect approach.  God, talking to and about his subject.  A lament, ultimately, of course.  How in a story like this could it be otherwise?