A "Blast" of a Dark Christmas

It’s hard to pick a conclusive “end” to the film noir cycle, but the brilliantly bleak b&w 1962 hitman saga Blast of Silence has got to be one of the very last fully formed works before the “revisionist” and homage items that showed up in the Seventies. Last year I wrote a lengthy review of the Criterion release of the film , and definitely recommend that you check it out.

One among many reasons it needs to be seen is its NYC location footage, and there is no better example than a segment I called “Noir Christmas” when I uploaded it to YouTube. Sheer masterful scripting and direction by Allen Baron, and kick-ass narration by Lionel Stander.

Film noir and Western collections on YouTube

I have been planning a post surveying the literally thousands and thousands of classic films that are currently available on YouTube, posted in their entirety by rabid fans (in sequences of clips, all running 10 minutes long — pity the poor viewer who tries to watch Giant that way….). I’m pleased and pretty much amazed by the intense work that goes into this kind of “sharity,” so I believe I should get a few of these links up on the blog before the Kopyright Kops who arbitrarily enforce the rules come and take these stashes down.

The uploaders usually group the films in terms of stars, but more often they are arranged by genre. One gent, calling himself by two hallowed names in the film noir canon, has put up some seminal Westerns and noirs. As Joel Cairo, he has put up five Westerns including three of the perfect Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott collaborations (I need to upload clips from mine own interview with the late, great Budd). Among the offerings from “Joel” are Seven Men from Now (1956) which was beautifully restored by UCLA, thankfully during Budd’s lifetime, The Tall T (1957), and Comanche Station (1960).

Joel’s account

As Hank Quinlan, our friend has put up some of the greatest noirs: Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, Nightmare Alley, and Touch of Evil are among the full films he’s uploaded. He also has added some of the cult favorites: Phantom Lady, Desert Fury, Ace in the Hole, and Blast of Silence. His collection is most definitely worth checking out. It’s very nice to have these films immediately at hand, although of course it would be best to see them in a theater on a screen with an audience. That experience doesn’t happen all that often outside the parameters of each city’s rep house or university auditorium, so this is a very handy way to catch up with the noir classics (although, one bit of advice: do yourself a favor and mark out the time to watch the films in their entirety, hopefully in one sitting; they are wonderfully paced for a single viewing experience).

Hank’s account

Have yourself a noir little Christmas

Go ahead, "Baby Boy Frankie Bono," revisit the Blast of Silence I put up on YT earlier this year as part of a review of the Criterion release.

Allen Baron's film was shot on location in NYC, and its Christmas sequence in Rockefeller Center gives a gorgeous portrait of what the city looked like in the early Sixties — and also offers a terrific opportunity for our hitman anti-hero (played by Baron) to feel even more isolated from the rest of humanity. The awesomely hardboiled voice delivering the second-person narration is that of the late, great Lionel Stander.

"You Have to Know a Man Like a Brother to Kill Him": review of Blast of Silence (1961)

For film noir fans, one of the most significant recent DVD releases was the Criterion Collection editon of Blast of Silence. The 1962 film has never been legally available before on either VHS or DVD, and is without question one of the very last great noirs made in the U.S.

I say “last” because film noir has been best defined (by Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader, among others) as a cycle rather than a genre, and the start/stop dates of the production of purebred noirs is generally thought to be 1944-55. A few gems came after ’55, including Robert Wise’s quietly beautiful Odds Against Tomorrow and Orson’s absolutely perfect Touch of Evil. By 1962, the date of Blast, however, noir had disappeared from movie screens and was seen to best advantage on the TV series Naked City. The cycle may have been over, but filmmaker-star Allen Baron supplied it with a beautiful coda with the exquisitely cold, visually gorgeous Blast.

The film follows hitman Frankie Bono (Baron) as he returns to New York City to take out a mobster. From the start, we know Frankie is a doomed man (see my previous entry on Classe Tous Risques) and to add insult to injury, he’s an unrepentant tough guy who, like all hitmen, is all business and would not make a very good drinking buddy.

The low-budget NYC production pretty much flew under the radar upon its initial release — though lauded (natch) in Europe, Blast was dropped on double bills by Universal, its distributor. The complete saga of the film is recounted in a very in-depth German-produced video documentary (insanely detailed, with a full tour of the NYC locations) included on this disc. What made the film such a cult hit on the rep circuit (I first saw it at the Thalia Soho in the late ’80s), is its pitch-perfect combination of elements.

The cast are all “no-names” except for Larry Tucker (seen in Shock Corridor, and a Paul Mazursky collaborator), but they perfectly incarnate the shady characters moving around the indelibly real NYC locations (the film was made on a meager budget; as with the Italian Neo-Realists and the French New Wave, poverty is the mother of cinematic invention).

But then you’ve got the piece de resistance, the narration. Credited to “Mel Davenport,” the second-person narration, which directly addresses our antihero (“baby boy Frankie Bono, out of Cleveland”), was written by the brilliant blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, Coming Home). And it is delivered by the most hardboiled voice ever, Lionel Stander. Stander isn’t credited, Baron reveals in the documentary, because he said he’d need more money if they used his name on-screen (which seems odd, as he too was blacklisted at the time the film came out), but his voice lends an unmistakably grim yet compelling tone to the proceedings — there is no question, the guy sounds like the tough-as-nails, no-bullshit conscience of Frankie Bono. He also dispenses with philosophical statements and no-exit existential reflections on mankind that must’ve surely thrilled the French, and linked Blast close to another late-late hitman noir, Irving Lerner’s terrific Murder by Contract (1958) (DVD release, please!).

Noir fans owe it to themselves to see and re-see the picture, but it always brings up a serious question: why didn’t we hear more from Baron as a filmmaker, noir or otherwise? Well, he is quite open in the documentary included here about the fact that Hollywood beckoned, and he answered the call. He only made two theatrical features after Blast (neither of which I’ve seen, so I can’t judge if they are in the BOS ballpark), but he worked steadily for decades on successful but formulaic series television (Charlie’s Angels, Dukes of Hazzard, my favorite non-guilty pleasure, Fantasy Island, and the immortal Kolchak: the Night Stalker). We’ll never know what Baron might’ve created if he had stayed an indie working on the East instead of West Coast, but we do have Blast, and is a serious dose of hardcore noir. Rent it, and lose yourself in the tunnel of desperation that comprises the life of “baby boy Frankie Bono” — and check out Manhattan back when it was a noir paradise.

Some helpful poster put up the film’s trailer:


These scenes, though, illustrate best what the film is all about. First its stark opening:


And then a beautiful bit of noir Christmas, as Baron’s character walks through Rockefeller Center at Christmas. This truly is the lonely poetry that best defines the film noir:

“End of the Road”: review of Classe Tous Risques

The best film noirs are invariably about doomed characters, men and women who initially rail against, and then make peace with the fact that, as one title put it, “nobody lives forever.” Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques (1960), which was recently released by Criterion, features one such doomed antihero, a crook named Abel Davos played by the great Lino Ventura. Classe begins with Abel and a cohort successfully pulling off a theft, but inadvertently causing the death of Abel’s wife. The rest of the picture finds Abel struggling with the fact that his future is pretty much nil, but he still has to care for his two sons. Enter a rather convenient helpmate: a young hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who helps him avoid the cops and also watches out for his kids. The fact that the melodramatic aspects in Classe don’t drag the film down is a testament to both fledgling director Sautet’s skill at pacing his curiously tripartite thriller, and to the film’s cast, particularly its two leads. For all the strangeness of his role (his character bonds with Ventura a mite too quickly), Belmondo makes a terrific costar — something he was never to do after he became a box-office god. Classe was made shortly after Godard’s A bout de souffle had been filmed, so JPB was still just a young eager performer who happens to get a nice showcase for his talents here, as you can see in the rather lengthy French trailer below. Ventura was a phenomenal talent possessed of an incredible face and a quiet simmering presence just made for noir: he gave two of his best performances for the king of French darkness, Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Deuxieme Souffle (coming out soon from Criterion — after not having played in the U.S. for decades!) and Army of Shadows (already out from… you guessed it). Speaking of Melville, he is revealed to be a fan of Classe in the notes included with the package. He raved about the film and director Claude Sautet, perhaps because Sautet was not a member of the French New Wave, the group of young filmmakers for whom Melville served as an inspiration, and later became an antagonist (in the 1962 piece included here, he in fact vaunts Sautet by crackin’ wise about Truffaut). Another major fan of the film is consummate film-fan and Funhouse interview subject Bertrand Tavernier, who maintains he wrote his first-ever review about the film, and defended its reputation as a B picture by declaring “Better to be B like Boetticher than A like Allégret!” (thereby slamming a noted French director and praising another Funhouse favorite and interview subject). Tavernier mounts an argument that the film’s seemingly odd construction, including a rather sudden ending, is to its benefit. Finally, since this is a review of a Criterion release, I have to praise the characteristically terrific obscure TV interviews they’ve dug up. First is a segment from a documentary on Sautet, in which he reflects back on this, his first complete feature as a director (he had taken over a preceding film), and the film’s initial box-office failure is discussed (it evidently was overshadowed by the new crime flicks like the aforementioned A bout de souffle). Ventura is seen being interviewed in both the Sixties and the Seventies, and proves to be as calm and reflective offstage as he was on (only don’t mess with him, alright? One sequence where he picks up a guy up and throws him over a table is explained by talk of his past as a Greco-roman wrestler). The most interesting supplement is an interview with the film’s scripter, Jose Giovanni, who adapted his own novel. Giovanni also wrote Le Trou and Le Deuxieme Souffle among many other films, and was unashamed to discuss his past as a crook (in fact Le Trou was his account of an unsuccessful jail break he took part in). He reveals that Classe was based on a real crook he knew when he was “inside” on death row. Now let’s see other crime-movie scripters compete with that sort of pedigree…. Here is the original French trailer for the film, which gave me a clue as to what the title was getting at, when the narrator pronounces it like “Classe Touriste”: