Assassinio per contratto

I first saw this movie when I was a kid and had a crush on Vince Edwards as Ben Casey. Well I am all grown up, no longer have a crush, and still think this movie was excellent for its time. The cold blooded approach of Edwards character Claude, his lack of affect, makes him more menacing than those shouting gun waving villains you usually see in film. This guy knows his job and that's all it is, a job. The music is so monotonous it fits the characters attitude (or lack of one). Even the other bad guys in the film know there is something not quite right about their hired gun. I liked it. Whenever it's on I make it point to try and catch at least some of it.

Murder by Contract (1958)

This cult-style low budget film is both fascinating and detached to the point of coldness (if not boredom), and whether you'll like or not might depend on attitude. The relentlessly cold-blooded murderous main character (played by Vince Edwards), in his late-50s handsome and sharply dressed style, is just false enough (if not exactly unconvincing) to keep the movie from taking on a life of its own in any conventional sense. We spend a lot of time watching this man get phone calls and then perform murders of various kinds (off camera, for the most part), and then zero in on the big one with a couple cronies watching. And yet he isn't especially fascinating or complex, just very hardened and determined. And so his functional presence, good looking as it might be to some viewers, isn't enough to lift up the movie.

And yet the story is told in such rapid, spare, and matter-of-fact terms it's downright original. I can't think of a movie like it, though I just happened to see "Blast of Silence" which is a far better low-budget story of a gunman, and it comes from the same period (1961). What helped that later movie, and many other offbeat non-Hollywood affairs, is all the ___location shooting (that is, the locations themselves were fascinating), and "Murder by Contract" almost studiously avoids any sense of place, or mood and ambiance from a place (except for bright, spare, fringe of L.A. stuff, which is nice). This series of mostly rooms and interiors (some with the same oddly speckled walls and doors) creates a blankness that is both drab and defining.

If this movie isn't really existential in the dramatic Orson Welles sense (or Carol Reed, or what the heck, Stanley Kubrick), the main character really is a film noir staple of a man out of place in the world and utterly utterly alone. His solution is a cold and increasingly false one--kill kill kill. For money, all toward some dream house on the Ohio River, of all places. I think the idea there is that his dream is actually modest, not some love nest in the south of France, but rather a place of honest comfort, like the farm Sterling Hayden returns to in "Asphalt Jungle." It may be no coincidence that Ben Maddow worked on the screenplay for both films.

So if you can adapt to the minimalist style (and acting), and absorb the rather intelligent cinematography by Lucien Ballard (a big name for this small film), you might start to see why it has such a lasting reputation. The music is pretty terrific, a kind of 1950s electric guitar ambiance ahead of its time. In fact, much of the movie is forward thinking out of desperation to make it cohere and succeed without any money. Director Irving Lerner (famously caught spying for the Soviets during WWII though never prosecuted) has had a long career as a secondary director or editor to some of the greats in Hollywood, and some of that talent and visual acumen is shown off here, whatever the larger limitations.

Claude (Vince Edwards) is a young man with a regular job, no history of trouble with the law and no chance of making any real money. He also has the brains and emotional detachment to make the big bucks as a hit man, and that becomes his new job title. A string of successful hits gets him sent to Los Angeles for his latest job. There he is accompanied by two goons: one who is perpetually nervous and the other who quickly worships the young man as a hero. The cold, ruthless hit man finally becomes unglued when he finds out that his latest target is a woman. She's a witness, set to testify against his boss, and guarded day and night by the police. It's her femininity that worries Claude: women are unpredictable, they don't do what you expect. Claude eventually proves that he is the unpredictable one and his own worst enemy.

This quirky crime film has the usual symptoms of a low budget and a tight shooting schedule: some poorly written scenes, poorly acted scenes and plot holes. But much of it works very well, especially the opening sequences depicting Claude's unusual job interview and his initial series of hits. I especially liked how the barber shop murder was handled. Vince Edwards is good in the lead, though he's better when he's not forced to mouth pretentious monologues that lay on the irony a bit too thick. (At one point I was reminded of Charlie Chaplin's fatuous comments about murderers versus soldiers in "Monsieur Verdoux.") The spare electric guitar score is effective. It's worth watching, especially since Martin Scorsese has acknowledged it as an influence on his films, notably "Taxi Driver."

Murder by Contract is a unique little film. It operates within its own little hermetic (back- projected) world, and it is no accident that one of its main scenes is set on an abandoned film studio. Vince Edwards plays a disaffected antihero, and, with its brilliant minimalistic guitar score (by Perry Botkin) it could be possible to read this film as Jarmushian WAY avant la lettre! The ending is quite disappointing - the film just kind of peters out, but there are so many beautifully observed details along the way. Not for nothing is the great Lucien Ballard the cinematographer. But who is Irving Lerner and what happened to him? Hershel Bernardi plays such a perfect kind of Second Avenue Theater role as one of the two "boys" who are the hit-man's handlers, and the over-sensitive call-girl scene is hilarious. Highly recommended - see it in a theater if you can! A film like this makes me angry at films like the way - over-hyped Reservoir Dogs. That film is SO overdetermined - the antithesis of a modest work like this one, which only reveals itself to the patient viewer.

Frankly, I came in expecting little from this totally anonymous abbreviated 50s crime drama and left the theatre shocked at how much bang for my 67 minutes I got. I am hard-pressed to think of another movie of this length which accomplishes as much plotwise or entertains as much audiencewise as this thoroughly neglected late-50s gem.

Vince Edwards leaps off the screen with amazing charisma to burn and Bernardi and Pine are nearly as effective as the hapless bumbling mobsters assigned to chaperone him through his contract. Conflict, wit, suspense, and outright humor abounds in this simultaneously clever and tense little script. Even the non-existent production values are completely camouflaged by economic and nimbly staged set-pieces.

The ending is probably the one weak point... it's a bit sudden and anti-climactic given what the movie seems to be building to. However, the good performances, nifty cinematography (some good POV work), and satisfyingly unconventional script make this slightly warped b-movie a classic which deserves far, far more attention. Melodramatic? Hell yeah. But in the best self-aware and crowd-pleasing tradition. 9/10 and worthy of the time of any crime drama or noir fan. Trust me.