The Cinematheque

“As bleak as noir gets … [Recalls] Jean-Pierre Melville’s French thrillers, and [has] a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese.”

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

Be it a straggler of the classic noir cycle or a forerunner of the neo-noir next generation, either way you slice it, Allen Baron’s 1961 cult classic is noir to the bone! A stylish, pared-down hitman picture that anticipates Melville’s Le samouraï, Blast of Silence stars director Baron as Frankie Bono, a hired gun whose latest assignment drops him in hometown Manhattan on Christmas Eve. The target: a mid-rung mobster. The stipulation: if Frankie is spotted in NYC, the contract is terminated. Blast of Silence was made on a shoestring, shot sans permits in real locations, and features one of the most captivating and idiosyncratic voiceovers in all of noir—a pulpy, existential second-person address (performed by Lionel Stander and written by Waldo Salt, both uncredited blacklisters), which conflates the viewer with the morally ambivalent antihero. This digital restoration reinstates the movie’s original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

“This compact and forceful low-budget film noir … compresses a week in a hitman’s bitter life into a dazzlingly brisk yet richly nuanced seventy-seven minutes.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“[A] cool, edgy 1961 noir feature … With its finger-popping jazz score and Beat-inspired interior monologue (in second person, no less), this might seem comical if it weren’t so rooted in existential dread.”

J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader