Murder by Contract

It's been a while since I looked through the movies that are about to leave Tubi. One that looked interesting and is leaving at the end of April is Murder by Contract, so I sat down to watch it in order that I could give you a review and time to watch it before it leaves Tubi.

Vince Edwards, about the only name in the cast I recognize, plays Claude, a man who's hoping to buy a home of his own some day. So he decides that the best way to earn the money to do it is to get work as a contract killer! He gets in touch with a Mr. Moon, representative of an unseen Mr. Brink, some sort of mobster who wants people killed. Eventually, Moon calls up Claude with a killing Brink wants done. Brink does quite a good job at it, even killing Moon for Brink.

This gets Claude sent out to Los Angeles, because Brink has a special job where he doesn't want the authorities to recognize the usual sort of people who did contract killings. Claude goes west by train, which kind of ticks off the two men who are supposed to contact him in Los Angeles, Marc and George. They inform Claude that Brink wants dead a Billy Williams, who is supposed to testify in a two weeks' time in the tax evasion trial of someone high up in the organization.

Claude responds by doing next to nothing for a week other than asking Marc and George to ferry him around town doing various things that don't seem at all involved with planning a contract killing. It turns out, however, the Claude is quite clever as this is a ruse. He's really trying to figure out if anybody has a tail on Marc and George, and therefore by extension him. He has to get away from the two somehow and then follow them to see if anybody else is also following. It's only then that Claude is willing to start planning the form of murder.

This is a bit difficult, if you will, in the Claude is also not your normal contract killer, in that other than the killings he's always been scrupulously law-abiding: never in jail, not even in reform school, and he'd prefer not to use a gun because that'll be found if anybody is ever searched. But that's not the real problem.

What really makes things a mess is that Claude learns the intended victim is actually a Billie Williams, not Billy -- it's the ex-girlfriend of the defendant, and Claude is unsure about killing women since they're more unpredictable. Billy is staying at her house out in the hills around Los Angeles, guarded by a whole host of policemen, so getting to the house is also going to be tough.

Murder by Contract is a really interesting premise for a low-budget movie, although the movie does have some problems. Surprisingly, I don't think the problems are the result of the low budget. One problem is that the Production Code was still well in force, which means that we know going in to the movie that Claude isn't going to get away with murder, since this wasn't an independent production. But there are also plot holes. Claude's first plot to kill Billie doesn't work, yet the police don't move Billie to an undisclosed safe house!

Murder by Contract is also interesting stylistically. Some would put it in the noir box, although I saw it as closer to something I once described as a post-noir, I think when I was writing about another Edwards film, City of Fear. That one was also set in a Los Angeles that looks much brighter than a traditional noir. Two other style points didn't quite work for me in the sense that I found myself focusing on technical aspects of the movie rather than the story itself. One was that the direction seemed closer to a foreign arthouse movie. The other is that the score, mostly solo guitar by Perry Botkin Sr. (father of Perry Jr. who co-wrote the Young and the Restless theme), which sounded like Botkin was trying to channel Anton Karas' zither score for The Third Man. Botkin's guitar works at times, but at other times it sounds jarringly wrong.

Still, despite the fact that Murder by Contract has some decided flaws, it's also most definitely worth watching, as it comes across as just different enough to be memorable.