The guy isn’t super-cool, in fact he kind of looks like David Paymer. He doesn’t seem like a phony to me, though. Just a regular looking guy who happens to be a hitman. Not a movie star.

The narration is really unique. It puts you in this guy’s shoes, explaining his plan and his thoughts and pays particular attention to the sweatiness of his hands. But strangely it’s not the hitman’s voice. It’s an unknown narrator, and he keeps saying “you.” You arrive in town. You have sweaty hands. Like this story is about you. About me. Or whoever’s watching it.

When the guy’s in Harlem the narrator says, “You hate them, and they hate you.” I was like what? No! That’s not true! Speak for yourself, narrator. Don’t involve me in your hangups.

He/you run into some dude from your past, when you grew up in an orphanage. (remember that?) At first it’s a problem, you’re worried he’s gonna get in your way. But it’s Christmas Eve and you got time to kill and he pressures you into going to this party and there’s this girl you used to like and you start letting personal distract you from professional.

There’s a gun dealer in the movie played by Larry Tucker, the guy who wrote I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS. He’s a fat guy with a beard who talks in a gentle, friendly voice – friendly to the point of creepy. I can’t remember seeing a guy quite like this in a crime movie before, but he reminds me of a character that would be in one Parker book as a fence or a finger (and most likely not survive to be in another). In fact the whole movie has the feel of some lost pulp novel Hardcase Crime or somebody might dig up. The narration really makes it like a novel and somehow, for me anyway, never seemed like too much. Even though it was an awful lot. I wouldn’t want that much narration in a modern movie, but in something like this it works. The visuals do the movie business and the words do what books do, putting you inside the guy’s mind.

It’s funny, pulp was supposed to be just some crap that hard-up writers could type up quick and use to pay their rent. But some of them turned out real good anyway, and this style of crime story formula is still appealing and hard to imitate in the modern day without seeming phony, like a musician today trying to pull off a zoot suit. BLAST OF SILENCE really is the cinematistic equivalent of one of those books. Solid, but not revolutionary. Of its time, but not out-of-date. It seems like there ought be a thousand simple, low budget independent crime movies like this, but I don’t know of any other ones from this era. The other guys with the cameras and black and white film were busy with carnivals of souls and nights of the living dead. It’s kind of an eye-opener to see that those weren’t the only guys doing it well, just the only ones anybody found out about.

Apparently Waldo Salt, blacklisted writer who later worked on SERPICO and COMING HOME, wrote the narration. But the writer/director is named Allen Baron, and he also plays you in the movie. So you are him, and I think you did a good job.

This is one of those movies I wasn’t sure about watching but then the opening was so great it could’ve turned into a round table discussion of agriculture subsidies and I probly would’ve kept with it. It starts with two out of town assholes walking into a diner and giving the proprietor a bunch of shit. They sit there in their coats and fedoras, ridiculing the menu, the policies, the customers, keep calling everybody “bright boy” and ask them condescending questions. It soon comes out that they’re not there for the steak sandwiches, they’re hired killers waiting for “the Swede” (Lancaster) who works at the gas station across the street to come in for lunch so they can ply their trade on him. (That means kill him. They are killers.)

He doesn’t show up, though, so the killers leave, and the “bright boy” customer who happens to work with Swede races to his house to warn him. But the Swede already knows, and he just lays in bed, resigned to his fate. So they show up and kill him.

So there’s your hook, there’s your mystery. Who had him killed, and why? We would ask the Swede, he obviously knew the answer, but the whole thing is he’s dead, so that doesn’t work. The movie follows a smart insurance investigator named Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) who figures out there’s some unrecovered job money involved in this and won’t let go of the case. He talks to the Swede’s co-workers, the old woman he left his insurance money to (a chambermaid he barely knew), the officer who arrested him once (also a childhood friend), one of his old girlfriends (the officer’s wife), his cellmate. They all tell stories about Swede and a picture starts to come together of a boxer who couldn’t fight anymore and fell into crime. Then Reardon starts to find clues about the Swede’s last heist, who was involved and what might’ve gone wrong. And he goes after the money.

Ava Gardner plays the girl whose charms Swede can’t resist, makes him put his brain on standby and switch over to “dick” mode. She doesn’t seem like a terrible person, but I guess technically she’s still a femme fatale, because she’s laying on a bed as bait while the men convince Swede to come in on a payroll robbery. She’s kicking her pantyhosed feet around like a kitten pawing at a ball of yarn. She knows what she’s doing.

She’s actually pretty smart about finding excuses to just be laying around all the time, so men don’t have to imagine what she looks like horizontally. It’s pretty over the top but at least she’s not bending over to pick things up or doing the Sharon Stone leg-spread or anything like that. I wonder if she had to do any furniture re-arranging though?

“Well, see you later Kitty, we have that hat factory payroll robbery to plan.”

“No, stay here, you guys can meet in my bedroom.”

“Well, that would be weird. Not enough room in there. Besides, we were gonna go play cards at Colfax’s, that’s a good place.”

“Well, is there a bed I can move into the living room?”

“Uh, I guess.”

Come to think of it, the Swede chooses to face his maker laying in bed, it might be an homage to Kitty. Or this might just be a movie about beautiful lazy people.

The cinematography is real good, very film noir. One of the extras on the DVD says it just looks like TV, but man I didn’t think so. Subtle things like when they’re at the coroner’s office and the room is bright so there’s a light background, but the light’s not on the people so they’re a dark grey. It looks good and very moody, not your usual shine-a-light-on-the-actors-and-shoot-them approach.

Apparently Richard Brooks and John Huston worked on the script, but it’s credited to this guy Anthony Veiller. I guess the opening 20 minutes comes straight from Hemingway’s story and the rest is made up. It’s a good mystery, even if it never matches the strong mood of that opening scene, with those guys talking down to everyone because they know nobody’s gonna mess with The Killers.

But it ends on a fun note. I like how it’s not a cop or private eye on the case, or even a guy who needs to solve the mystery. In fact, Reardon’s boss doesn’t care what happened and tries to move him on to something else. He just becomes obsessed, it’s like a puzzle to him and he doesn’t want to give up on solving it. When he finally has it all figured out, having gone far beyond the call of duty, he goes home for the weekend. Then he’ll be back Monday for some other case.

[ratings]

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