Claude è uno spietato ed efficiente killer professionista, finché non scopre che il prossimo obiettivo è una donna.Claude è uno spietato ed efficiente killer professionista, finché non scopre che il prossimo obiettivo è una donna.Claude è uno spietato ed efficiente killer professionista, finché non scopre che il prossimo obiettivo è una donna.
- Premi
- 1 candidatura
- Mary
- (as Cathy Browne)
- Miss Wexley
- (as Gloria Victor)
- Theatre Patron
- (non citato nei titoli originali)
- Gun Salesman
- (non citato nei titoli originali)
- Hotel Take-Out Delivery Man
- (non citato nei titoli originali)
Trama
Lo sapevi?
- QuizShot in seven days.
- BlooperClaude crawls through quite a length of drain pipe and the crawl space beneath Billie's house, but emerges into her living room with no dirt on his clothes or person.
- Citazioni
Claude: The only type killing that's safe is when a stranger kills a stranger. No motive. Nothing to link the victim to the executioner. Now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody's willing to pay. It's business. Same as any other business. You murder the competition. Instead of price-cutting, throat-cutting. Same thing. There are a lot of people around that would like to see lots of other people die a fast death... only they can't see to it themselves. They got conscience, religion, families. They're afraid of punishment here or hereafter. Me...
[laughs]
Claude: I can't be bothered with any of that nonsense, I look at it like a good business. The risk is high but so is the profit.
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.
- secondtake
- 6 mag 2011
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- Murder by Contract
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- Tempo di esecuzione1 ora 21 minuti
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- 1.85 : 1