Silent Blast

Last year during the Christmas season, one of Eddie Muller's picks for Noir Alley was a new-to-me picture called Blast of Silence. I recently sat down to watch it, not realizing that it's set during the Christmas season even if it isn't really a Christmas movie.

In this extremely low-budget movie, Allen Baron (who also directed) stars as Frank Bono, a hired hitman who is showing up in New York City in order to do another hit on some mobster type he doesn't know and doesn't really care to know. Indeed, all Frank wants to do is to be alone as he figures out where, when, and how to carry out the hit. But of course, he can't always be alone; after all, he's going to have to deal with the people who are paying him for the hit.

But those aren't the only people. Frank doesn't carry his own gun, since using the same gun for multiple killings is going to get him found out sooner or later. So he has to deal with a middleman, the vulgar Big Ralph (Larry Tucker). Ralph lives in a grimy apartment and keeps sewer rats for pets, and is just as honest as everybody else in this business, which means not very. Trust nobody.

Trying to figure out how to carry out the hit is going to take some time, as Frank needs to figure out a time when the mobster is going to be alone without his bodyguards around. So he starts following the mobster, taking longer because he doesn't want to be noticed. This also gives him more free time when he really can't be following his target, time that will result in other people seeing him. One day at a bar, an old friend who grew up in the orphanage with Frank, a man named Petey, shows up, and invites Frank to a Christmas party together with Petey's sister Lorey (Molly McCarthy). Frank starts to fall in love with Lori, but he doesn't know how to be a gentleman around women. And besides, Lori has more complicated feelings towards Frank. And then Ralph shows up again, deciding that perhaps he should blackmail Frank since Ralph has figured out who the target it. This could bollix the whole operation.

In some ways, that's a fairly short synopsis for the movie. But then, this is a fairly short and low-budget movie without a whole lot going on. There are a lot of scenes of Frank walking the streets of New York that don't really add much to the movie in terms of plot of character development, with the possible exception of showing just how alone Frank really is. But those scenes do provide a lot of value in the form of showing New York as it was back in the early 1960s, both the somewhat fashionable sidewalks, and the much more dismal neighborhoods where the Frank Bonos of the world spend most of their time.

If you examine Blast of Silence too closely, you'll realize just how little is happening. But the movie is still worth a watch. It got a Criterion release, although to be honest it's much more the sort of movie that ought to be part of a box set instead.