Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958)

Herschel Bernardi, Phillip Pine, and Vince Edwards in Murder by Contract

Cast: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel, Michael Granger, Kathie Browne, Joseph Mell, Frances Osborne, Steven Rich, Davis Roberts, Don Garrett, Gloria Victor. Screenplay: Ben Simcoe. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Carlo Lodati. Music: Perry Botkin Sr.

Irving Lerner's lean, clever Murder by Contract is a favorite of Martin Scorsese's, and you can detect its influence in his work, especially in the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). Claude, the central character of Lerner's movie, is a loner and an enigma, who like Travis works off some of his sociopathic urges by exercise. Brawny, brooding Vince Edwards, who gained some fame in the 1960s as brawny, brooding Dr. Ben Casey on television, plays the hit man Claude, who is both a sociopath and a misogynist -- he refers to women as "pigs" and freaks out when he discovers that his latest target is a woman: "The human female is descended from the monkey, and monkeys are about the most curious animal in the world. If anything goes on, it just can't stand not to know about it. Same thing with a woman." We first meet Claude in a wonderfully elliptical scene in which he's applying to a Mr. Moon (Michael Granger) for a job. We aren't told what the job is, and we never even meet the man named Brink who is the actual employer, but our suspicions, if we have them, are confirmed when Claude is put to the test in a couple of contract killings. Succeeding in them, he's sent to Los Angeles, where he connects with a pair of Brink's henchmen, George (Herschel Bernardi) and Marc (Phillip Pine), who help him set up for the murder of the key witness in an upcoming trial. But Claude keeps his cool, stalling George and Marc, insisting on touring L.A. before finally setting up for the kill. The result is some entertaining scenes in which Claude frustrates the hot-headed Marc but wins over the more intelligent George. Marc mockingly refers to Claude as "Superman," which is more apt in the Nietzschean sense than in the DC Comics sense -- some have even called Murder by Contract an "existentialist film noir." The movie falls apart a bit at the end, which feels anticlimactic, though it's hard to see how it could have topped the very good beginning and middle. Ben Simcoe is the credited writer, but Ben Maddow, who wrote the screenplay for John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and probably the best movie made from a novel by William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), is said to have worked on the script.