Ever since I read about Blast of Silence in RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, back in the time before you could just get a movie in moments, I’ve wanted to see this movie. I often hold back watching movies until I feel like I’m ready for them and this movie lived up to everything I thought that it would be.
Frankie Bono is a hitman working with Cleveland-based organized crime — this is where I remind you that there’s no such thing as the Mafia and Italian-Americans are a diverse group not strictly employed by organized crime — comes home over the holidays to New York City. He’s there to kill Troiano (Peter H. Clune), which won’t be an easy kill. He’s told that if he’s seen before the kill, he won’t be paid his full paycheck.
He buys a gun and silencer from Big Ralph (Larry Tucker, who wrote Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and developed The Monkees with Paul Mazursky), a strange man who keeps sewer rats. Between his disgust for that individual and his growing memories of discontent with where he came from — growing up alone in an orphanage — and a disastrous holiday meal with old acquaintance Petey (Danny Meehan) and an even worse get-together with Petey’s sister Lorrie (Molly McCarthy) that ends with him assaulting her before regretting his actions, Frankie is falling apart before he even gets to his work.
Following Troiano and his girlfriend (Milda Memenas) to a Greenwich Village jazz club where beat artists bellow about lost love, Frankie finds Big Ralph ready to blackmail him. He follows the man home and strangles him before calling his bosses to say he can’t do the hit. He’s told he has no choice. As he starts falling to pieces, he tries to convince Lorrie to leave town with him, only to discover she already has a man (Dan Saroyan).
All alone, as he claimed he always wanted to be, he kills his mark and escapes, nearly caught multiple times, before calling for the rest of his money. The meeting place is an isolated spot by the water and Frankie is ambushed by multiple killers, shot numerous times and finally dies in the freezing December water.
He was already dead anyway. That’s because Blast of Silence may seem like a film noir from what you’ve read but it also has a completely deranged way of telling its story. That’s because Allen Baron, the director, writer and star of the movie wasn’t like most filmmakers. He got the cameras and lights for this movie from a movie he’d been on the crew for, Cuban Rebel Girls, which had been left in the country when that movie — Errol Flynn’s last — was abandoned when the production had to run in the face of the Cuban revolution. The producers of that movie — which was directed by Barry Mahon — told him that if he could get the equipment smuggled out, he could use it. As it was, Baron was already a wanted man in that country, as he was sleeping with a woman who was the girlfriend of a gangster. A confrontation ended with him shooting that man.
Shot mostly in New York City locations with no permits, the end of the film was shot at the Old Mill on a Jamaica Bay estuary on Long Island during Hurricane Donna, a location that Baron knew was a dumping ground for the dead bodies of mob hits. That moment where he hits the water and dies? That’s no stuntman. The snow and waves and rain in that scene isn’t fake either. It was filmed during Hurricane Donna.
What makes it even weirder is that the film flirts between grindhouse and arthouse, a movie that should be about bad people and murder that opens up the emotional damage that its lead is suffering from. That’s told through narration that was written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, Coming Home) and read by also blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, which is embued with dread. Just check out how the film closes: “God moves in mysterious ways,” they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again, back in the cold, black silence.”
It’s also filled with dark imagery that seems more thought-out than the normal B picture that it — on the surface — it is emulating.
Oddly, for as much about crime and murder as it seems like Baron knew, the idea that a silencer would work on a revolver is impossible.
Allen Baron was born to immigrant parents at the start of the Great Depression. In his memoir, Blast of Silence, he discusses how his father died when he was eleven, how he dropped out of school in the tenth grade, worked on the atomic bomb at sixteen years old and worked in comic books all before his mother sent him to Los Angeles to find an ex-boyfriend of hers. Once there, he ended up at Paramount Studios, inspiring him when he got back to New York City and became a cab driver. With just $20,000 he would make this movie, which was supposed to star Peter Falk. Instead, he did the role and created a movie that is still discussed sixty years later. Its creator would go on to work mostly in TV, although he did direct Terror In the City, Outside In and Foxfire Light. I find it as dark and sad as this movie that its creator went on to make episodes of The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch and The Dukes of Hazzard.
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