[Re: “Stolen Lies? It Sounds Like TCM’s Red Eddie Muller is Ripping Off Dead Men’s Blacklisting and ‘Graylisting’ Lies.”]
By David in TN
Friday, December 17, 2021 at 7:46:00 P.M. EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence (1961), with Allen Baron and Molly McCarthy. Baron directs, as well as playing the main character.
Criterion Collection: “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 a mechanical precision, yet also with an eye and ear for the oddball idiosyncrasies of urban living and the imposing beauty of the city.”
David in TN: I haven’t seen this one. As noted above, it got a Criterion Collection release. Baron was mainly a TV director. At the time, organized crime was a favorite theme in movies and TV.
2 comments:
FWIW According to Wiki Allen Baron is still with us @94.
Allen Baron's Blast of Silence (1961) is worth watching as a time capsule for what New York looked like circa 1960-61.
A mob assassin, played by Baron, is sent from Cleveland to kill an over ambitious minor mobster. He looks like Deniro from the front, a little like George C. Scott in profile. Allen Baron never acted again after this, was a TV director for decades.
Lionel Stander did an uncredited narration "in the second person," said Eddie Muller, who went into a rhapsody of praise for the Communist Stander.
This has a typical trope for this type film--Things go wrong. Baron has trouble with a contact played by an overweight actor named Larry Stewart, who gave the same characterization in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962) as a homosexual. Stewart later was a screenwriter and producer.
Early on Baron follows his target doing his rounds in Harlem, checking on his "girls, dope, books, numbers." Through Harlem, the narration goes: "The streets of Harlem are busy enough, no one notices you. You catch a danger signal. Your hands are sweating but that's all right, because you know what it is, the hate of Harlem. You hate them and they hate you."
The final scene was filmed during a hurricane which hit the East Coast in December 1960. It adds to the climax.
There is no Noir Alley this weekend due to it being Christmas Day. Saturday night TCM shows The Bridge Over the River Kwai and Witness for the Prosecution.
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