Waldo Salt

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Blast of Silence (1961)

September 10, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Baron today resides in Malibu and is a painter.

From working as an abstract expressionist painter to directing episodes of Charlie’s Angels, Allen Baron has done pretty much everything you can do in the world of visual arts. But what he did best of all was to write, direct and star in the classic 1961 noir, Blast of Silence. The drama smartly uses bold yet low-budget symbolism as it follows a veteran mob assassin who may be doomed by a crisis of conscience.

An orphan and a loner, Cleveland hitman “Baby Boy” Frank Bono (Baron) has survived into middle age by making sure other people didn’t get the same opportunity. He’s been paid to come to New York to use a mid-level mobster for target practice, just the latest body he’ll add to his count. Against the backdrop of marvelous street scenes in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Bono pursues his quarry with steely determination until a chance encounter with a childhood friend makes “Baby Boy” rethink his grown-up existence–and perhaps imperils his life.

The movie has a nearly omnipresent hard-boiled narration (performed by Lionel Stander and penned by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt) that judges, evaluates and almost mocks Bono each crooked step of the way. But the scenes that are most memorable are the ones that occur in between the narration. Especially golden are the passages in which Bono squares off with a corpulent gun dealer (Larry Tucker), who lives in a dump with cages of pet rats. They’re a pair of predators looking to turn each other into prey. When the men tussle and overturned cages allow the rats to scurry free, it’s hard to tell the actual vermin from the human kind. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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