Blast of Silence

Peter Falk had agreed to act in Blast of Silence but withdrew from the project for the promise of "a few dollars a week and a bag of peanuts" acting in Twentieth Century Fox's Murder, Inc. (1960). The role of "Kid Twist" Reles made Falk's film career. Blast of Silence's running narration was written by blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt, signing himself as "Mel Davenport." For his services as a narrator, actor Lionel Stander offered Baron the choice of a $1,000 fee if his name was used and only $500 if the narration were anonymous. Baron opted for the cheaper price. Going into production, Baron had $2,800 and a reel of film he had salvaged from the production Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), in which Baron had played a small part. Baron's hope was to get into the can fifteen to twenty minutes of film that he could use to attract investors. Baron and his crew agreed to use a raw film stock from Eastman Kodak provided they could "test" a reel. Baron used all of the test footage in Blast of Silence. The entirety of Blast of Silence was filmed without permits. Only Lorrie's apartment was a set, mocked up in an unused midtown firehouse. At one point during principal photography, Baron and his crew were stopped by officers of the New York Police Department, who suspected them of performing surveillance on the NYPD. The storm seen in the film's climax is Hurricane Donna, which affected the entire eastern coast of the United States in September of 1960. In addition to playing his death scene and performing his own death stunt, Allen Baron had to play one of the gunmen shooting at himself. After shooting his death scene, Baron retired to Downey's for a steak dinner and by chance met the men who would finance Blast of Silence. Once they had seen his footage, Alfred Crown and Dan Enright offered Baron $18,000 to finish the film. Blast of Silence was completed and ready for exhibition two weeks too late for the Cannes Film Festival. Universal-International acquired the film, which it distributed briefly in the summer of 1961 as a second feature. In 1990, Blast of Silence was heralded at the Munich Film Festival. That year, a West German TV crew followed Baron through a return to New York to visit the film's existing locations, and the ensuing documentary was titled Allen Doesn't Live Here. In 2006, documentary filmmaker Robert Fischer repurposed that film as Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence. In 2007, Blast of Silence was included in the esteemed Criterion Collection. by Richard Harland Smith Sources: "Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence", Blast of Silence DVD

Blast of Silence writer/director/star Allen Baron was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927. As a child, Baron made pocket money by announcing incoming calls to the corner candy store payphone for his neighbors on New Lots Avenue. Prior to becoming involved in film and television, Baron was a comic book and magazine illustrator. Baron supplemented his artist's income by working as a New York cabbie. Baron played a small role in Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), the last film of Hollywood legend Errol Flynn. As a start-up filmmaker, Baron often met friends and contacts at Downey's Bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. Among the Off Broadway actors who gathered at Downey's was Peter Falk, whom Baron offered the lead role in Blast of Silence. At Downey's, Baron also made the acquaintance of Alfred Crown, a film and theatre impresario who financed Blast of Silence with partner Dan Enright and later produced Frank Perry's Last Summer (1969) and Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971). Playing Ralph the arms dealer in Blast of Silence is Larry Tucker. Tucker later appeared as the gum-chewing lunatic Pagliacci of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) and cowrote such films as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969). Blast of Silence leading lady Molly McCarthy had appeared previously as Steve McQueen's girlfriend in The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959) and had later roles in the cult favorite Over the Edge (1979) and in The Flamingo Kid (1984). She is the mother of WFMU disc jockey Michael Shelley. Seen briefly in Blast of Silence as Lorrie's boyfriend is Don Saroyan, who had worked with Allen Baron on Cuban Rebel Girls and was at the time married to Carol Burnett. by Richard Harland Smith Source: Just One More Thing: Stories from My Life by Peter Falk "Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence", Blast of Silence DVD

"The result is simultaneously awkward and pretentious... Even so, Mr. Baron has some interesting ideas about New York locations, and aided by the expert photography of Erich Kollmar he has made effective use of such settings as the Staten Island ferry, Rockefeller Plaza and the Village Barn night club. The outdoor scenes have a spontaneous vigor that augurs well for the director's future." - Eugene Archer, The New York Times "You're the end of the line Blast of Silence. You carry the full weight of film noir's history on your slender shoulders. It must be very loosely. But you suck up your courage and give it a go. And whadya know? You turn out a winner. Yeah, Blast of Silence is most definitely a classic example of what can be done on a low budget." - The Film Noir Bible "... offbeat and intense..." - Mark Deming, All Movie Guide "But for all of its pulp poetry - the picture begins in a railroad tunnel, transformed by the narration into a birth canal that will blast the silently screaming Frankie into the harsh reality of Penn Station - the film retains a down-and-dirty, documentary aspect. The studiously gray, unglamorous views of 1961 Manhattan - St. Marks Place, where Frankie takes a room at the Valencia Hotel; the blanked-out East 30s, where Frankie's mark has a girlfriend stashed in a walk-up apartment - are worth the price of admission alone. Here's what was being left out of those Madison Avenue melodramas and Park Avenue romances of the period." - Dave Kehr, The New York Times "... the single greatest feat of voiceover narration in history." - Matt Prigge, Philadelphia Weekly "With one foot planted firmly on the Kiss Me Deadly [1955] era of film noir and the other closer to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [1976], Blast of Silence begins with a brutal, uncompromising invocation of birth and ends with an almost mystically sensitive death... What Blast of Silence 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." - Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine "Blast of Silence is possibly the great lost masterpiece of film noir; a twilit, deathward emanation of everything that had underlain the form from its beginnings. No American film before it, made in Hollywood or anywhere else, had trafficked so promiscuously in unadulterated nihilism, or so used the condition of Hate - constant, irritated Hate, with no coherent Other to direct it toward - as its emotional motif." - Tom Sutpen, Bright Lights Film Journal "Working with a miniscule budget, Baron creates charged compositions out of found locations and makes a virtue out of the film's cheapness. The soot and litter almost seem summoned by his character's mental state. Established admirer Martin Scorsese could easily have had it in mind when he made Taxi Driver [1976]; Blast of Silence shares that film's tortured philosophizing." - Keith Phipps, The Onion A.V. Club "How influential has Allen Baron's Blast of Silence been? Since it was out of circulation for decades, the answer may seem to be 'not very.' All the same, it was a crime film shot on the run in New York City, long before Abel Ferrara gained a name for doing so, and it contains scenes that could prefigure the works of David Lynch." - Ramsey Campbell, Video Watchdog "The beautifully executed narration by Lionel Stander is an important part of the film's effect. It provides a running description of the inner life of the character, a man who is comfortable only when he's alone and it's quiet, who has rendered himself unfit for normal discourse....Bleak, dark and strangely arresting throughout, Blast of Silence is not quite a can't-miss proposition, but one comes away from it feeling as if one has seen a minor classic of some kind. Yes, minor - but still a classic." - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle "...fascinating, bleak tale..." - The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film "Arguably, Allen Baron's Blast of Silence is one of the very best film noirs in cinema history....the cinematography of Blast of Silence is so outstanding that it turns New York City into a character rather than a mere location. Even though Blast of Silence was Baron's first movie, his professional background as a comic book illustrator gave him a firm understanding of visual concepts such as framing and composition....Considering the brave and elegant aesthetics of Blast of Silence, one is left perplexed at the subsequent filmmaking career of Baron." - Marco Lanzagorta, www.popmatters.com

NARRATOR (Lionel Stander): "Remembering out of the black silence you were born in pain." NARRATOR: "You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap on the backside to blast out the scream. And then you knew you were alive." NARRATOR: "When the Better Business Bureau rings the Christmas bell, the suckers forget there's such a business as murder... and businessmen who make it their exclusive line. Like you, Baby Boy Frankie Bono. Out of Cleveland." NARRATOR: "They all hate the gun they hire." NARRATOR: "The target's name is Troiano. You know the type – second string syndicate boss with too much ambition. And a moustache, to hide the fact that he has lips like a woman. The kind of face you hate." NARRATOR: "You don't have to know a man to live with him. But you have to know a man like a brother to kill him." RALPH (Larry Tucker): "So how ya been. You makin' a dollar?" NARRATOR: "He thinks he looks like a gentleman if his shoes are shined. You could kill him right now with pleasure." NARRATOR: "You want a woman? Buy one – in the dark, so she won't remember your face." FRANKIE (Allen Baron): "I guess I just don't mix in." LORRIE (Molly McCarthy): "I vote we dance. Unless, of course, you'd rather push another peanut across the floor." NARRATOR: "Troiano with his high-priced dame and Ralphie and his rats. Two of a kind. And the conga drum beatin' your head 'til you taste the hate on your tongue." FRANKIE: "I'm warnin' you, Fatty, you're stickin' your belly where it doesn't belong." NARRATOR: "You're relaxing now. Hands cold again. There'll be a gun in them soon and your mind's running clear and cool. Expert. As an engineer designing a bridge. You could've been an engineer." NARRATOR: "Nothing can go wrong – no mistakes. Because this is your last job. You've got that figured out. You've faced fact. You know you're through." NARRATOR: "Watch it, Frankie. Danger signals, like electric current, like lightning, like fire in the night and sirens screaming in your head. Don't think. Don't remember. Don't look ahead. Concentrate. You have a job to do and you're an expert. A killer who doesn't kill gets killed."

"Every breathtaking moment is a lifetime of suspense as you're swept along with a hired killer on a murder safari into the dark depths of the asphalt jungle." That's how the ad copy reads for one the original posters made for Blast of Silence (1961), directed by Allen Baron. What? You've never heard of the film, or the director? Well... The Criterion Collection just stepped up to the plate to correct that gross injustice with a DVD that does something very, very rare. It delivers a film that actually lives up to the hyperbole put on its poster. It's a film that should have been given a bigger push upon its original release but, as an independently financed production, not much weight was tossed behind and instead the film was released as a second feature with no fanfare, giving the director a calling card to Hollywood (where he did a lot of TV work) but leaving his debut work to fade into obscurity until being hailed in 1990 at the Munich Film Festival as a rediscovered masterpiece. Blast of Silence was the low-budget directorial film debut of a young cartoonist and painter with a bit of acting experience under his belt who somehow managed to cobble together a beautiful and haunting black-and-white film shot on a 35mm Arriflex camera that is an existential story about something that is brutally universal to every man or woman born, no matter what bonds you forge with family or friends, namely; you are born alone, and you will die alone. For professional killer Baby Boy Frankie Bono the loneliness is amplified by a misanthropic bitterness and contrasted by his delusional and wistful dreams of who he might have been instead; like an architect or an engineer. But instead of being a useful and productive member of society he's the lowest of the low: a paid killer. Baron puts on several hats for his production; director, screenwriter, and lead actor. The decision to step in front of the camera as Frankie Bono came up only after a friend who was originally meant for the part walked off to pursue a career-making role; Peter Falk was given an offer he couldn't refuse in Murder, Inc. (1960). Several elements make Blast of Silence an exhilarating and unique ride, such as its narrative choices, eye-catching compositions, and its visual style. The omniscient and jarring second-person narration is read by the blacklisted actor Lionel Stander (who appeared in Roman Polanski's film Cul-de-sac, but will be remembered by most as Max on TV's Hart to Hart). Stander is uncredited, but not for any reason beyond the fact that Stander offered to do the narration for $500 sans credit, or $1,000 with credit, and Baron was on a tight budget. The narration itself was composed by Waldo Salt, another blacklisted talent, and the award-winning writer behind Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, and The Day of the Locust, to name a few. This narration not only sets the tone for the film, it also infuses and informs the story with an unrelenting prose of acidic pulp poetry that really wants to shake Frankie Bono by the collar and slap him around – adding a splash of coffee on the face for good measure. Watching Blast of Silence it's no surprise that the compositions should be so thoughtfully crafted as Baron was used to working within the frame during his time as a graphic illustrator. But Baron's experience as a stage actor also helps him keep from turning other actors into simple props and he lets them inhabit their space. Witness Larry Tucker's performance as Big Ralph, and see how his greasy fingers find a way to continuously touch Frankie Bono, who is clearly repulsed at being used as a giant napkin, but still keeps his cool because he really needs a silencer that only Ralph can procure. Baron taps into an aesthetic akin to Italian neorealism by using an on-the-fly approach to location shooting that sometimes catches the glance of a passing bystander that happened to spot the secretive camera as it made its way through the various environs familiar to the director, who was shooting on his own turf in New York City, capturing the raw energy of places like lower Manhattan, Harlem, Greenwhich Village, and Rockefeller Plaza. Working with a small crew meant things could be flexible, making it possible, in one example, for Baron to film a key shoot-out at an abandoned fishing village during a cold and windy snow-storm, even though it meant waiting for almost two weeks for the weather to be perfectly bad. Baron's independence and freedom also meant he could improvise. In one stunningly creepy shot, the camera looks out and down from an apartment window and captures something that was not rehearsed, planned or scripted as we see nuns line up a schoolyard of orphans into the pattern of a swastika, and then march them away. And then there's Baron's protagonist, a character that many of his experienced friends in the industry warned him would be far too angry and bitter for the average filmgoer to connect with. But Baron, instead, embraced the nihilism of his anti-hero intuiting, rightfully so, that this despicable creation did something else too, it accentuated a loneliness that would be his centerpiece - especially when put up against the hustle-and-bustle of New York City during Christmas. The holiday season also allows for a few unguarded moments to occur, which remind us that Frankie Bono is very human, and not above attending (albeit reluctantly) a party, or even participating in a peanut-race where the goal is to push the peanut across the floor with nothing but your nose. The Blast of Silence DVD, released by The Criterion Collection, is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and features a new digital transfer from a composite 35mm fine-grain master positive that was cleaned up using the MTI Digital Restoration System, and uses audio restoration to clean up the soundtrack on Dolby Mono. Extras include a 60-minute long documentary titled: Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence (which uses unedited material from the 40-minute long 1990 documentary Allen Doesn't Live Here Anymore, adding in a new interview shot in 2006 with Baron), rare on-set Polaroids, a special collection of photographs and essays that revisit the locations in Blast of Silence with Allen Baron (Photos taken in 2008 by Susan Arosteguy), a booklet "featuring an essay by film critic Terrence Rafferty and a four-page graphic-novel adaptation of the film by acclaimed artist Sean Philips (Criminal, Sleeper, Marvel Zombies)," and, of course, a trailer (which, oddly, does not use Stander's narration). Also included is an Easter Egg with some of Baron's original comic artwork. For more information about Blast of Silence, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Blast of Silence, go to TCM Shopping by Pablo Kjolseth