Until I recently saw Blast of Silence on Turner Classic movies I would have said that film noir ended with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), but Blast of Silence, with its film noir tropes, either signifies the end of film noir or the beginning of neo-noir, as Eddie Muller said in his erudite introduction to the film. Allen Baron, the director, plays the hired killer Frankie, adrift in New York at Christmas in this dark film with a budget of $20,000 (equivalent to about $180,000 today). Molly McCarthy plays Lori, the girl he runs into from his childhood as he violates his own rule of avoiding everyone and lives (and dies) to regret it. Larry Tucker, so good in bit roles in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962) and Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) makes his acting debut as a gun broker who lives with his pet rats. There is a fatalistic narration by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, written by blacklisted Waldo Salt, in the unusal second person. Unusual for movies, that is, but not in radio (The Whistler, in the forties and fifties) or in comic books, where Baron had worked for a time.
The film opens with a tiny dot of light, that becomes bigger and bigger as the train carrying Frankie from Cleveland to New York comes into Grand Central Station on Christmas Eve. We follow him as he carries out his errands, from following his contracted victim to obtaining the gun with a silencer that he needs for the job and eventually throws into the river. Baron plays the role quietly and intently, looking rather like George C, Scott in the intensity of his concentration. Once he meets Lori he tries to get out of the job but the guy who hired him says "no" and "now you're in trouble." After trying to force himself on Lori he returns to her to apologize and finds another man there, shaving. Frankie goes ahead with the job, then goes to collect the money on a rainy and windswept Jamaica Bay and ends up dead, shot to death and covered with mud.
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