Frankie Bono (writer and director Allen Baron) has come to New York City at Christmas time to assassinate a low level gangster. A borderline sociopath, Frankie scours the city looking for his mark and preparing for his hit. He rendezvous with an eccentric gun dealer and an old flame who ignites in Frankie a humanity he thought he’d lost which he expresses violently.
Blast Of Silence (1961) juxtaposes the lonely hitman tailing his mark with the revelries of Christmas. Frankie cuts through crowds outside of store windows as determined to kill a man as the shoppers are to find that perfect gift. Blast Of Silence is a cold, unsparring meditation on the loneliness of the holidays articulated with the genre conventions of a hard boiled film noir.
Blast Of Silence is a micro budget film that makes use of small, light weight cameras and location shoots in much the same way as John Cassavetes’ film Shadows (1959). Blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt penned the voice over that drives the film and is at once its most essential and detrimental asset. Baron’s low budget meant that he often had to shoot without sound, relying on dubbing all of the dialogue in post-production. To give the film and the main character momentum Baron utilizes Salt’s voice over which acts as a kind of internal monologue.
At times this voice over is emotionally evocative or insightful while at other times it feels redundant or melodramatic. The voice over is so constant that it can’t help but begin to describe the images it accompanies. This signals the artifice of the device, revealing the limitations of the film noir genre and of low budget filmmaking in general.
What makes Blast Of Silence a difficult film is that it puts the inherent misogyny of film noir at the forefront. Salt’s writing is particularly misogynist that, when coupled with Bono’s attempted rape of Lori, renders the character of Bono extremely unlikable. And it isn’t that a misogynist hitman is anything new or that the archetype is exclusively unsympathetic, it’s that Bono lacks any other characterization other than his misogyny and desire to kill. So although Blast Of Silence is a technical and stylistic marvel of low budget filmmaking it’s not a particularly pleasant viewing experience.
