Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/14/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961)

Allen Baron in Blast of Silence

Cast: Allen Baron, Mollie McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Peter Clune, Danny Meehan, Howard Mann, Lionel Stander (voice). Screenplay: Allen Baron, Waldo Salt (voiceover narration). Cinematography: Merrill S. Brody. Art direction: Charles Rosen. Film editing: Merrill S. Brody, Peggy Lawson. Music: Meyer Kupferman.

A very late film noir, Blast of Silence strips the genre to its bleak essence. A hitman (Allen Baron) comes to New York at Christmastime to whack a guy, falls in love, carries out his job, and pays the consequences for his decision that this would be his last hit. Made on a shoestring with equipment that had been smuggled out of Cuba after Baron appeared in Errol Flynn's last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls (Barry Mahon, 1959), it's a tightly assembled sleeper of a movie that wonderfully milks its New York location and ends with a memorable scene shot on Long Island during Hurricane Donna. Baron had wanted his friend Peter Falk to play the melancholy gunman, but took over the role himself when Falk was unavailable. It's a great one-off of a performance: Baron has no other acting credits besides this one and the Flynn movie, and his directing credits were mostly in TV on shows ranging from Surfside 6 to The Love Boat. The atmosphere of New York in the late 1950s and early '60s is wonderfully captured: That beatnik-era accoutrement the bongo drum makes its appearance at a party and again as the accompaniment to some mopey ballads with titles like "Dressed in Black" and "Torrid Town," sung by Dean Sheldon at the Village Gate nightclub. A voiceover narrative, written by Waldo Salt under his nom de blacklist "Mel Davenport" and read by uncredited fellow blacklistee Lionel Stander, was added after the film was assembled to cover some expository gaps. It's more effective than most voiceovers are at setting the mood and tone of the film, although I find it occasionally too portentous.