Every once in a while, out of nowhere, a film will arrive sui generis I saw one recently at the Joe Dante film festival at the New Beverly. It’s a film from the 60’s called The Sadist, and it stars Arch Hall Jr. as a psychotic Starkweather-esque killer who tortures a group of school teachers while they try and repair a car for him. The grandfather of these films – it seems – would be Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, but they come along, from Primer to Stranger than Paradise, to everything in between.  

Allen Barron’s film Blast of Silence is about a contract killer Frankie Bono (played by Barron), who comes to New York to do a job. His procurers are protective, and he finds his mark and gets in contact with Big Ralph (Larry Tucker) who will help outfit him with a weapon.  But while in New York, during Christmas season, he grows restless, runs into someone from the past, and comes close to realizing the life he could have had had he not been a killer. But, in this world, there’s only one option for a man like Frankie Bono, and that check’s gonna clear at some point or another.

Narrated by Lionel Stander, this is a hard drinking, hard living, New York noir, and – due to it being shot on the streets (mostly sans permit), it’s got that feel down right. Running 77 minutes, it also doesn’t fuck around. This is a nasty, but brilliantly little realized film noir, and well worth the rediscovery The Criterion Collection affords.

The film is presented in full frame, and in the original 1.0 mono. Extras include an hour long making of from 1990 called “Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence” and it takes Barron to all the film’s locations, and tells of how originally Peter Falk was going to be cast as the lead. There’s polaroids from the film’s shooting days, pictures of the locations from 2008, and the film’s theatrical trailer.