El verdugo condenado

The strongest impression left by director/star Allen Baron's 1961 Blast of Silence is that the fabulous postwar years are gone, fini, kaput. The gritty 60s have arrived, and Manhattan is grimy, garish and awash in human as well as inanimate litter -- the 60s in which transvestite hookers started knifing U.N. diplomats in Times Square. Into this nascent cesspool travels tired hitman Frankie Bono; he comes by train, through a dark and endless tunnel which seems to symbolize either the birth canal or the human condition -- or both. He's a full-time loner (like Vince Edwards in the somewhat similar Murder by Contract) out to do a job, collect and move on. But he happens upon some old acquaintances from his childhood in an orphanage and succumbs, clumsily, to some human contact. This proves his undoing. The ending takes place in a desolate shore not unlike the Staten Island locations of Sorry, Wrong Number. Blast of Silence is amateurish and "personal," in the style of the John Cassavettes films that would soon follow -- products of that edgy, verbal New York culture of jazz boites and improvisational theater. It's no masterpiece, but it's worth seeing for anyone tracking the turns the noir cycle took in its last, dying years.