El verdugo condenado

This B& W film, set in New York uses its locations and actors with great skill. The sound editing is very effective and adds moments of tension to the atypically dark contrasty lighting. One shot of an exterior street is enormously powerful without any action beside the cityscape. The director has a great eye - not as good at acting as directing though. If you like film noir - this low budget film is worthy of your viewing.

Blast of Silence is a short tense jewel of the genre. The story of a lonesome hitter coming back to NY on Christmas Eve to perform yet another job. Except this time, with NY, there comes back a whole lot of personal moments too. I won't unveil the plot, it's actually very simple and straightforward, and that's precisely why I'm amazed the whole thing just works so smoothly -indeed chillingly. No need for double crossing, double minded gangsters: those unnecessary decoys uninspired directors use to try to spice up their movie and gain 5 minutes!! Here you know the guys are going to play by the rules i.e. bad and simple!

And the suspense is kept at an incredible level just by the sheer darkness of the atmosphere and obviously by the decadent streets of NY which is shown in a very tough manner.

Baron plays Bono and although not an actor, he gives a credible performance. Maybe because he doesn't really have to talk so much. Most of his thoughts are narrated by a great voice over (Lionel Stander -he was cut off from the cast due to McCcarthysm). Note Larry Tucker's cool performance who would go on to win a Golden Globe for Shock Corridor.

Just for the quote because it hit me as an instant cult quote: "Baby Boy Frankie Bono". I'll admit nothing incredible in that, but listen to Standler say it and you'll understand!!

The strongest impression left by director/star Allen Baron's 1961 Blast of Silence is that the fabulous postwar years are gone, fini, kaput. The gritty 60s have arrived, and Manhattan is grimy, garish and awash in human as well as inanimate litter -- the 60s in which transvestite hookers started knifing U.N. diplomats in Times Square. Into this nascent cesspool travels tired hitman Frankie Bono; he comes by train, through a dark and endless tunnel which seems to symbolize either the birth canal or the human condition -- or both. He's a full-time loner (like Vince Edwards in the somewhat similar Murder by Contract) out to do a job, collect and move on. But he happens upon some old acquaintances from his childhood in an orphanage and succumbs, clumsily, to some human contact. This proves his undoing. The ending takes place in a desolate shore not unlike the Staten Island locations of Sorry, Wrong Number. Blast of Silence is amateurish and "personal," in the style of the John Cassavettes films that would soon follow -- products of that edgy, verbal New York culture of jazz boites and improvisational theater. It's no masterpiece, but it's worth seeing for anyone tracking the turns the noir cycle took in its last, dying years.

Saw this one a few weeks back on the big screen at the American Cinematheque and it has stayed w/ me. Baron was about as short and homely as leading men get but somehow in this bleak and uncompromising piece he's effective (particularly in voice-over). Some striking cinematography (especially the wonderful opening train sequence) and a few long takes (Baron walking an entire rundown city block of a sidewalk with no other business, the stirring snowy pier finale) are memorable. Also good is the sleazy fat bearded character actor whose name escapes me (he also appeared in Fuller's SHOCK CORRIDOR around the same time).

There isn't a lot of humanity in BOS though, and the one moment when Baron opens up to the girl he has befriended, he gets slapped hard with cold reality. A well done scene but it only piles on to the disaffection and malaise already permeating this movie. Don't expect to laugh much or take a date; the proceedings rarely stray from deadly serious. This is a movie full of lapsed morals and betrayal but you can take heart that the system remains firmly in control at the chilling end of this downbeat but solid late entry in the noir cycle.

Yeah, rememberin' da time when you was a kid and saw this movie on late night TV. Even then you was wise that it was a shabby-lookin' lowdown no-budget job and the cast was not so good lookin' -- but that's OK, you liked it that way. These was the kinda people you could see all around you, every day in da neighborhood, downtown, on the street corner, in the subway. Yeah, this looked like life in the city, but wit' a special kinda danger, a certain mystery. You ain't never forgot this movie, didja? Oh, you didn't remember what it was called or who was in it, but it stuck wit' ya and bounced around yer brain like the beatin' of a conga drum in a Greenwich Village beatnik club. Didn't think it would ever catch up with ya, didja?

Ya seen it again tonight, huh? The actin' still ain't so great and the people still ain't so good-lookin'. But that's OK, 'cause it's still the coolest damn thing ya ever seen. Ahh, Hollywood is for saps. You want somethin' gritty and dark, don't ya? 'Cause that's the way you like it.

Rememberin'.