Blast of Silence

Cult Films and Midnight Movies "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1 By Tom Baker

I couldn't possibly heap enough effusive praise on Blast of Silence (1961) a buried hardboiled gem of a picture, gritty and dark enough to have been penned by Raymond Chandler at the top of his game. It was written and directed and stars Allen Baron, who plays Frankie Bono, who looks like the dream I had of Deniro last night, with a touch of Joe Pesci and a slapdash of Johnny Cash mixed in (he also faintly reminds me of Lee Ving back in 1980). He was in Cuba filming another movie (Cuban Rebel Girls with Errol Flynn) when he accidentally shot a dude, slept with the daughter of a local gangster, and had to flee due to the Revolution. The producers of THAT film agreed to let him use their equipment if he could smuggle it back stateside from Cuba. Sounds like he had a life every bit as interesting as the character he portrays here. [1]

So I had a dream last night, about the aforementioned Deniro, and this morning came across a collection of movie stills from this film that someone had posted to Facebook. I realized how much the lead actor resembled him, and also that Boyd Rice had named his last NON album after the title of this picture. This makes sense since Boyd mentioned in what I take to be his most recent interview an affinity for "film noir." Anton LaVey had the same affinity, and so do I, a confirmed reader of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the tough, gritty Black Mask school of hardboiled detectives and desperate, angry, bitter, and cynical anti-heroes. A world that exemplifies the misanthropist's Darwinian worldview. Which, I must admit (and you may damn me for), I have to embrace as the cold, hard reality of the "real world."

At any rate, hit man Frankie is back in NYC, to pull a job for the Mob, and the narration continues on and on, commenting on Frankie's every turn. [2]

I can't quote it exactly, but we find out Frankie is an orphan, has "always been a loner," and was born in a blast when "the silence ended." Into a "world of hate and pain." You get the idea. The world is predatory, Frankie is a man alone, and he's a killer. ALL men are killers, and the world is a senseless butcher shop, where "slain men hang in rows."

Frankie gets his money, being back in town to eighty-six Troiano (Peter H. Clune), a gangster of a lower order. Along the way, he buys a gun from the crooked, morbidly obese fence Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), who keeps pet rats in cages. Big Ralph looks like the average, bearded fat man of 2023, but in 1961 such morbid obesity was much more rare and made one seem suspect. Frankie buys the gun with a silencer and then runs into his old chum Petey (Danny Meehan), who invites him to a Christmas party. There he hooks up with an old flame, Lorrie (Molly McCarthy). Going back to her apartment, he sexually assaults her, apologizes, and then amscrays. He walks the hard, concrete bowels of the city (the cinematography is bold, beautiful, and deep black and white, conveying the feeling of a "dead museum," to quote Burroughs), in the massive stone and steel wilderness, making his way through Harlem, where, "they hate you and you hate them." And the vintage camerawork here puts you back in a time and place, an era. It could almost be documentary footage.

Big Ralph, dining with Troiano, tries to blackmail Frankie for the gun, but Frankie finds him back at his rat-festooned digs and strangles him in a violent, bloody scene that underscores that this whole movie is an examination of our predatory world, where some men are hunted, some hunters, but, all, finally, endowed with the capacity to kill. It seems random, broken, meaningless, and without cheer. But there it is.

To say any more would ruin the experience for those who have yet to see this dirty, gritty, beautiful, and compelling Christmas Carol of the Damned. (Indeed, it takes place in the "bleak December," as a caroling Chorus is heard on the soundtrack, in between blasts of jazz, their haunting refrain echoing off the tenement walls as phony Santa Claus impersonators disappear down rooftop chimneys in department store displays. But that is all too poetic for a simple movie review.)

Frankie races downward to his inexorable fate, in the end, betrayed. It's a dog-eat-dog world, right? Perhaps senseless, but as Our Narrator intones:

"The scream is dead. There's no pain. You're home again. Back in the cold black silence."

But all of that is a little too gloomy. Only hepcats and hit men wax so poetic.

A buried gem. Don't pass it by.

Note.

[1] "Blast of Silence". Wikipedia. 7-12-2023. Web. Retrieved 7-15-2023. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_of_Silence

[2] The narration is tough-as-nails street poetics vocalized by an uncredited Lionel Stander utilizing the rare "second-person" narrative point of view; i.e. the director or author or whatever speaks to the protagonist as if he were reading one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books that always addressed the reader directly, saying "You went to the so-and-so, and did such-and-such." Get it?

Blast of Silence (1961) Trailer

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