Swift, brutal, and black-hearted, Allen Baron's New York City noir Blast of Silence is a sensational surprise. This low-budget, carefully crafted portrait of a hit man on assignment in Manhattan during Christmastime follows its stripped-down narrative with mechanical precision, yet also with an eye and ear for the oddball idiosyncrasies of urban living and the imposing beauty of the city. At once visually ragged and artfully composed, and featuring rough, poetic narration performed by Lionel Stander, Blast of Silence is a stylish triumph.

***

This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place...

Wandering through a bleak Manhattan in the midst of its Christmas Eve rush like some hoodlum Holden Caulfield, Frankie Bono (Allen Baron) is positively saturated with hatred for everyone and everything around him. He was supposed to be concentrating on Troiano (Peter Clume), the mid-level mob boss with more ambition than brains who he’s been brought in from Cleveland to send to an early grave. But being back in New York, especially around Christmastime, ruins him with memory and he begins slowly losing the intense focus and passive hostility that brings him these high-paying assignments as a professional hitter. So with Troiano gone home to Long Island for the holiday, Frankie decides to clear his head by losing himself for as long as he can in the vast, indifferent throng, taking a walk around this hated city before it’s time to get back to work.

Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence was dumped like a corpse into a handful of theaters by Universal-International in April 1961 and rapidly vanished without a trace, only to be revived with no real frequency over the ensuing decades. Looking at it from the studio’s point of view, it’s not difficult to see why the film was barely a priority at the time of its release, being a cheap distribution pick-up from a couple of executive producers in New York (one of whom, Dan Enright, had distinguished himself as an especially mendacious figure in the Quiz Show scandals that consumed America for several months in 1958). In fact, Blast of Silence must have seemed downright perverse to executives at U-I, given that its protagonist wasn’t played by a Star, or anyone well-known to the public from either film or television, but by its writer/director; a pudgy, 26 year old non-actor whose prior directing credits had been a couple of Hawaiian Eye episodes and an assistant director gig on that piece of dreck, Cuban Rebel Girls (1959) — a picture that, had it not been for the allure of seeing Errol Flynn hitting the skids on celluloid, probably wouldn’t have been screened anywhere outside a couple of mangy drive-ins in Alabama and Kentucky. But Blast of Silence was a fast, cheap thriller with the requisite amounts of violence and gunplay, and those things could always make a couple of bucks for a studio in the end if the deal was right.

Of course, nobody was thinking in terms of “film noir,” certainly nobody in Hollywood in 1961.

Excerpt from from Tom Sutpen's review at Bright Lights Big City HERE