Review: Blast of Silence

Blast of Silence begins with a brutal, uncompromising invocation of birth and ends with an almost mystically sensitive death.

Blast of Silence
Photo: Universal Pictures

With one foot planted firmly in the Kiss Me Deadly era of film noir and the other closer to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, writer-director Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence begins with a brutal, uncompromising invocation of birth and ends with an almost mystically sensitive death. The story of socially isolated hit man Frankie (Baron) who comes to terms with his deferred need for human connection just in time for, one, Christmas and, two, a job that will require him to be especially cold-hearted, Blast of Silence is less a manifestation of the labyrinthine plot trajectories of great noir than an early harbinger of the DIY moxie of the American independent movement.

Baron’s blunt, almost perfunctory story doesn’t reveal much about the inner workings of its central character, instead taking advantage of the downright dull aspects of New York City, a city that films (especially noir films) often depict with mythic reverence as a succession of places you’d want to visit but aren’t even sure you could live therein. As far as the movies are generally concerned, New York is as artificially engineered an environment as Disneyland or Stepford, Connecticut (or Hollywood). What Blast of Silence, which was shot on a shoestring budget, gets and gets right is the sense that New York, for all its “top of the world” potential, is also a working metropolis with accompanying concessions, mediocrities, and isolations.

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Much like Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, the tension of Blast of Silence doesn’t so much revolve around the antihero’s job, redemption, or ultimate fate, but rather the disconnect between a mundane milieu and the grandiose flourishes they’re meant to convey. Frankie spends the film looking schlubbish and constipated, far from the suave operator that the narrator coolly informs us is in the top five percentile earnings-wise. The film’s narration, incidentally, is often cited for its use of the rare second-person address, but my take on it is that it’s actually dissociative first-person from within the protagonist’s overstressed psyche—that the instructions Frankie takes his cues from are actually coming from inside the house, so to speak.

For all the narrator’s insistence on stressing the dangers around every corner, Blast of Silence’s bland images suggest that the world truly couldn’t care less about Frankie’s dogged pursuit of a gun with a silencer. At one point, a headline screams one of his crimes, but he’s the only character shown even bothering to read the article. Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film depicting a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which it would have made sense if a tumbleweed flitted across the deck.

Score: 
 Cast: Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Peter Clune, Danny Meehan, Howard Mann, Charles Creasap, Bill DePrato, Milda Memenas, Joe Bubbico, Ruth Kaner, Gil Rogers, Jerry Douglas, Don Saroyan, Dean Sheldon, Lionel Stander  Director: Allen Baron  Screenwriter: Allen Baron, Waldo Salt  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 77 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1961  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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