Get Christmas Over With in a BLAST OF SILENCE (1961)

Christmas is almost here, and if there's one thing nobody talks about it's that it's perfectly fine to not be in the Modern Christmas Mood.  Even though the stories of people getting trampled in a mad search for Tickle Me Biebers are exaggerated, there's a secret contingent of those who want them to be true in hopes that Kristmas Kommercialism will be shut down for good and they can get back to holing up next to the space heater with their complete series box set of Gilligan's Planet.  While Bad Santa is a logical choice for an anti-Christmas movie, it still manages to squeeze in the True Meaning of Christmas at the end, if only jokingly, so consider this movie an ode to the X-Mas Discontent.  A longtime staple of festival circuits and why-in-the-fudge-isn't-this-on-video-yet lists, Blast of Silence is a 1961 crime thriller shot in crisp B&W on the holiday decked streets of New York, and I couldn't think of a more black-hearted plot to garnish the birthday of Baby Jesus.

A train hurtles through a black tunnel towards the light as blacklisted actor Lionel Stander narrates:

"Remembering out of the black silence...you were born in pain.  Easy!  Easy does it, little mother...you've never lost a father!  You're job is done, little mother... You were born with hate and anger built in, with a slap on the backside to blast out the scream..."

Hitman Frank Bono (played by Allen Baron, the movie's writer/director) returns to New York after a stint in Cleveland, and though he hates Christmas decorations and music surround him at every turn.  A contact meets him on a ferry to tell him his instructions, reminding him not to be spotted or else the deal is off.  His target is a mob boss nestled in suburbia, and the narrator quips, "His neighbors will say 'But he was such a respectable man!'"  Beneath all the narration is a wild jazz score by none other than Meyer Kupferman, one of Classical music's great nutballs and an equally nutty Re-Composing subject.  Also a great subject of discussion is Larry Tucker, here supplying Bono his gun as Big Ralph, who you may remember as Pagliacci from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.  He was more notable as a writer, having worked on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (movie and series!) and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, as well as developing The Monkees.  I'd like to think it was his idea for his character to hide his money in the oil well of a student lamp, or keep several mice as pets.

Much of Blast of Silence is made up of "Baby Boy" Frank Bono, in wait for his target to be alone, walking the streets of New York, dense with life and detail, a character in itself.  The narrator swings between Bono's internal thoughts and a persistently cynical micro-manager, and he may hate Christmas more than Bono himself.  It's more than just grinchiness, as Bono doesn't want to spend "another Christmas running from the cops," and Stander blows his mood out to searing existential bitterness.  The long and directionless waiting of a hired gun is a deft portrait of loneliness, and the extended handheld tracking shots of Bono make a grand spectacle of late-50's modern design, doubly gaudy with the multicolored (I assume) lights, with a reindeer merry-go-round as a capstone.  As much as we all love late-50's/early-60's design it's very easy for the look to turn tacky, and I can only imagine what a vacuum of taste it must have felt like to be trapped in Blast of Silence's Department Store Metropolis.

He is invited to a party by old friends, but the narrator reminds him how much he hates parties.  The mood is bizarre - a mixture of doped-up swing music and a guy with a conga drum, spiced up by a contest wherein Bono and his friend push peanuts across the floor with their noses.  The next day brings more bells and boychoirs, and Bono goes to see Lori, an old flame who he met at the party.  After a tense conversation about what Bono was doing in Cleveland, the two kiss and Bono gets a little too carried away; Lori asks him to leave, as well as why he doesn't have a girlfriend.  Perhaps it's because he spends all his time stalking murder targets, and having to kill Big Ralph for demanding more money after an accidental moment of exposure doesn't help things - there are only more people waiting in the wings to do Bono in.

The plot doesn't get any cheerier - people are going to die and nobody is going to be wished a Happy New Year*.  In many ways Blast of Silence is the polar opposite of a Christmas movie - it's every man for himself, eternal strife on Earth and ill will towards men.  The black & white cinematography makes Winter in the city especially bleak, all bare trees and bare asphalt.  Bono doesn't crack a smile the whole time, and he has no reason to.  The narrator is out for blood, his snide death rattle of a voice leading the audience to the spirit-crushing end with a twisted grin.  All of this is in the spirit of noir cinema, of course, and Blast of Silence was one of the last true noirs ever made, the end of an era kissing the fresh behind of 60's B&W underground cinema.  It's unblinking brutality and breakneck pace made it a sleeper classic, and much like the coming blogtraction A Cold Wind in August has been kept in a meek limelight by devoted fans of vintage independent rarities.  It didn't receive a video release until 2008, when the Criterion Collection added it to their ranks, complete with a comic book insert recreating the movie's opening with stark, pulpy glee.  I'm a bit mad as I write this, because while somebody had uploaded the whole thing to YouTube it was taken down, and so I can't be as generous as I'd like, but I do have the brilliant opening sequence, courtesy of another reviewer.  And hey, you've still got time to shop on Christmas Eve, so you've got a chance to make Blast of Silence an icy gift for that special, pessimistic someone.  See it ASAP, and blast out the scream of Yuletide Malice.

~PNK

* Rats, rats, double rats, of course I wrote that sentence before Lori wishes Bono a Happy New Year over the phone.

A Roaring Short-Order - LIONPOWER FROM MGM (1967)

You come up to a ramshackle treehouse with a rope ladder.  As you ascend the ladder, you notice a sign on the door:  "FANZ OF THE 60S ONLEE - ALL OTHERS R POOPOO HEADS!!!".  If you're not game for a blast of late-60's nostalgia, turn back now.  For those of you still left, come on in - the Cinerama is warm tonight.

Lionpower from MGM is an unusual entry for this blog - it's a 27-minute promotional reel of MGM's 1967-68 season, only shown to distributors and exhibitors.  I saw it as a filler short on TCM the other night and it blew me away, and I watched it again tonight with and equally wide grin fixed on my face.  I've always had a soft spot for late-60's movies ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is one of the best payloads of late-60's Hollywood hooey I've ever seen.  The studio system was falling into a state of crisis, as the introduction of the ratings system, the growing counterculture, and the phasing out of short subjects were all radical changes to how movies were made and marketed.  One of the treats with these kinds of promotional reels is how well its content has dated, and this particular selection of films is heavily conflicted, at once readying for the future and clinging desperately to old models - and man is it a hoot.

The lineup is split into five seasons: the usual four of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer, and a fifth "season" of roadshow movies, meaning they got a limited big-city release before a wide release and required reservations (a practice phased out in the 70's).  It's narrated with glorious cheesiness by Karl Weber (Search for Tomorrow, Perry Mason) and initially set to music from the 1950 movie The Magnificent Yankee, fixing MGM's grasp of promotion squarely in the past.  He boasts the most "creative filmmakers" and the "biggest stars", and doesn't lie in either claim - not only are directors like John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick in the roster, nearly every movie has a huge, blockbuster star at the helm, some of them baffling in their combinations (two in particular I won't dare spoil, but be forewarned that David Niven and Raquel Welch are embarrassing themselves).  This short also makes for a fine drinking game, wherein the viewer takes a shot for every movie they've actually seen - the majority of them have fallen into obscurity, with a few popping up in the recent wave of big-studio on-demand DVD-R releasing catalogs (and a couple of those may show up on this blog in good time).  

The transitions from film to film are hysterical, such as the transition from Fall's Point Blank (a stylish thriller starring Lee Marvin) to Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Your Teeth are in My Neck: "From murder...to madness...and biting comedy at its best!"  A George Hamilton heist flick, Jack of Diamonds (never released to video, more common than you'd think in this lineup) has the narrator stating, "Excitement is another breed of cat - a cat burglar who dares danger at every height!"  Another fall movie, Our Mother's House, is another never-on-video movie that I've been seeking for ages, and if you know where I can find it I'd give you 12 million Mickey Mouse monies for the privilege.  Fall tops off with the bloated-looking Sophia Loren/Omar Sharif historical romance More than a Miracle, and then Winter "surges ahead on Lionpower!".  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton headline - "People...politics....passion...in heat...in Haiti...in Graham Greene's The Comedians!"  David MacCallum fires guns in the go-go-riffic Sol Madrid (which I've got to see, but is not on video, much to the dismay (or is it relief?) of fellow stars Rip Torn and Telly Savalas).  Dark of the Sun is the serious-sounding filling to an unbelievable dud sandwich of The Biggest Bundle of Them All (whose VHS is available for the low, low price of $84.99 on Amazon) and The Extraordinary Seaman (mercifully never released to video), both of whose segments must be seen to be believed.  Also MIA for the home market is another go-go inflected thriller, A Man Called Dagger, and the Charles Bronson co-starring-western Guns for San Sebastian has a VHS for the comparatively modest price of $47.96 when compared to the aforementioned Bundle.  

"Lionpower springs into Spring", and I'll bet that most of you forgot that Hermans' Hermits even had a movie, much less that it had the portentious title Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.  If your eyes recover, the mysterious force of The Power, another George Hamilton flick but seemingly much better than Jack of Diamonds, will knock them right out (or turn them upside down, or whatever happened to that one guy strapped in the g-force chair...).  Once Lionpower "roars into summer" the viewer is subjected to an Elvis movie, Speedway, here paired with the comparatively poor singing voice of Nancy Sinatra in a year when these movies should have been dead for a long time.  Surprisingly, the Richard Burton-helmed Where Eagles Dare doesn't even have footage ready, and the spot is illustrated through delightfully cheesy "animation".

However, it's not nearly as cheesy as Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, with Doris Day heading up an embarrassed cast trapped in a chintzy living room and stock sex komedy krap.  Ice Station Zebra is another big hit in the lineup, but beforehand we get a glimpse of the Sunset Boulevard-esque psychological drama The Legend of Lylah Clare.  Now come the two Roadshow pictures, both well-known now: Far from the Madding Crowd, which gets the longest segment of them all, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the narrator doesn't elaborate upon in terms of plot or stars.  Instead, all we see is one of Douglas Trumbull's slit-screen effects and some stars while Karl Weber talks about "all the stars of the solar system".

The most curious portion is a parade of cartoon teasers for movies yet to be produced, done in the same minimalist 60's style of the Where Eagles Dare bit, as nothing had been shot yet.  Some of them are remembered fondly, such as The Shoes of the Fisherman, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Phantom Tollbooth (not released until 1970 and done in a completely different art style from the one in the bit).

Some others are less well-known, such as The Fixer from the novel by Bernard Malamud, Tai-Pan (not released until 1986), James Michener's Caravans, released ten years later by a different studio, and The Appointment, an apparently terrible Sidney Lumet movie that features the funniest piece of animation:

The most unusual are a trio of movie that were never made, two of them: Cornelius Ryan's WWII history The Last Battle, James Eastwood's totally forgotten mystery The Chinese Visitor, and The Tower of Babel, a Middle East-set political thriller to be directed by Peter Glenville (whose last film turned out to be The Comedians).  Announcements rise and fall all the time, but it's odd to see promotion for movies that never came to be, and it's impossible to tell if those would have been any good.

Whatever your tastes, the short is a ton of fun, and most of the films will be new on you unless you're a near-masochistic freak for 60's pop culture.  If you've got TCM they may play it again as an interstitial, but I have no idea how often they do it.  It's the exact kind of thing that'll never get a video release, so don't hesitate if you get the chance to see it in high quality.  For those of you who don't care about clarity of picture, here's a generous YouTube upload, which is where I got all those screencaps.  I guarantee you'll laugh, cry, or puke no matter which movie you're rooting for.

~PNK

The Here of Over There - 1918 (1985)

It's easy to forget that our current distaste for war and gung-ho patriotism is a fairly recent one, due in no small part to the proliferation of global communication.  It's harder to kill somebody when you have the chance to talk to them, and many wars in the past had mutual isolation and disinformation for catalysts.  War is impossible for one person to fully comprehend - statistics and battlefield footage are mere suggestions of forces much greater than the individual, and if the battles aren't taking place in their own back yard they might as well not exist.  The problem is that a fantasy vision of war is essential for it to continue, as the general populace wouldn't want to throw anybody into battle if they experienced it firsthand.  World War I was a distant, incomprehensible mess to America, and we only got involved near the end after a great deal of resistance.  It never reached our soil, but another incomprehensibility did - the influenza epidemic of 1918, which took between 50 and 100 million lives, eclipsing the casualties of the war.  Mostly known as the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, playwright Horton Foote depicted the intersections of these two forces with meticulous detail and sensitivity in 1918, a slice of his massive theater trilogy The Orphan's Home Cycle and a reminder that excitement, values and delusion are closely related.

Set in a small Texas town in the fall of Guess When, 1918 follows the lives of the Robedauxs, including the tailor Horace (William Converse-Roberts), his pregnant wife Elizabeth (Hallie Foote, Horton's daughter) and his ne'er-do-well brother Brother (Matthew Broderick).  As the war draws to a close the pressure of joining the cause comes to the Robedauxs, and Horace is intent on taking an offer to hire a doctor to lie about his health so he can stay with his wife.  He's also trying to locate his father's grave - he lost a three-year-old daughter to the flu and he wants everybody buried together.  Brother is more enthusiastic about joining up, but most of his information comes from newsreels and he talks too much about German spies in neighboring towns.  His gambling debts make an uneasy garnish to his snideness.  A misguided group of good ol' boys march around town in makeshift uniforms, waiting for a tour that will never come.  Gossip spreads like wildfire, and debates spring up as to whether one can legitimately be a dual citizen (especially with Germany).  Everybody hears the wails of mothers who have lost their children, including Bessie, an emotionally challenged girl who visits tge Robedauxs from time to time.  None of this is helped by Horace getting the flu, of course.

The story keeps a real distance from the Big Parade overseas, and in reseaeching this film I found critics who were disappointed in the film's unwavering focus on uninvolved people.  I think that's what makes the movie interesting.  Everybody's afraid of the big dangers but they don't have enough distrust in others to peer behind the curtain.  Foote's interests lie more in exploring the attitudes and customs that kept such a proper face on things in disaster times, and the film's best moments of pathos come from characters trying desperately to maintain composure.  The acting is pitch-perfect, with the unfortunate exception of the eternally wooden Matthew Broderick, who was in the original stage production and may have been the reason the movie got financed.  Shot on location in Texas, director Ken Harrison opens up the landscape with enormous warmth and attention to shot composition and lighting.  The perennial problem with adapting plays to the screen, how to expand the setting, is dealt with elegantly and without force.  While I think the movie stands just fine on its own, it's good to keep in mind that it's only one ninth of the whole cycle, so I suspect I'd feel much differently about everything that had happened if the rest of Foote's magnum opus came to my DVD player.

The film is very, VERY small scale, so if you're not interested in a highly detailed period portrait you may end up ejecting the disc into the wastebasket.  The DVD is way out of print and used copies are expensive, so I'd try your local library instead of dropping $35 on a movie you may not like.  If you're game for it and you have a taste for modern theater you'll be just peachy, and perhaps an increase in fandom can bring more of Foote's Robedaux saga to the big screen.

~PNK