Blast of Silence (1961)

“This compact and forceful low-budget film noir…compresses a week in a hit man’s bitter life into a dazzlingly brisk yet richly nuanced seventy-seven minutes.” — Richard Brody, The New Yorker

SYNOPSIS

Christmas in New York becomes a season of alienation, paranoia, and murder in Allen Baron’s remarkable independent noir, a lean, mean exercise in urban existentialism that anticipates the gritty street-level filmmaking of the New Hollywood. Baron himself stars as Frankie Bono, a solitary contract killer who returns to his native Manhattan during the holidays to carry out an assignment, only to find his professional detachment increasingly compromised by unwanted encounters with his past and the loneliness of his chosen existence. Shot on a shoestring budget amid the bustling streets, crowded bars, and wintry waterfronts of early-’60s New York, Blast of Silence combines the fatalistic machinery of classical film noir with the immediacy of documentary photography and the restless experimentation of emerging independent cinema. Lionel Stander’s abrasive second-person narration gives voice to Frankie’s increasingly tortured consciousness, turning the city’s festive bustle into an almost unbearable reminder of his estrangement from ordinary human companionship. At once hardboiled thriller, psychological character study, and invaluable portrait of a vanished New York, Blast of Silence is a ferociously accomplished American independent film whose bitterness cuts all the deeper against the sentimental comforts of the Christmas season.

Blast of Silence screens as part of our limited series, Not So Merry and Bright, spotlighting a handful of not-so-festive holiday classics from the alternative Christmas movie canon.