The speaker (Stander) seems to know every mistake Bono is about to make. Lionel Stander’s distinctive voice-over narration is such a crucial element of Blast of Silence. As Baron recalls, “…we’d heard all these stories about the Mafia burying bodies here and killing people. A fatalistic narration delivered by gravel-voiced Lionel Stander and written by the blacklisted Waldo Salt lends this New York story poetic distinction even as it trowels on a layer of pretense. And let out the hate and anger another way.” The train finally reaches the end of the tunnel and surges into the light. It is scene that would never have appeared in earlier ‘classic’ Hollywood film noirs of the late 1940s and 1950s. This scene lasts for over a minute, with the camera remaining stationary as Frankie walks briskly towards it. As Allen Baron explains, “Lionel Stander was a black listed actor. So that’s why he doesn’t receive a credit” (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart). Pie in the Sky (1964), 2010, The New York Times online. However, two syndicate thugs ambush Frankie, chasing him along one of the narrow wooden bridges that cross the creek. Moreover, it is a technique that also humanizes Frankie Bono to some extent. At the same time, suffering his own inner pain” (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart). Coincidentally, Falk was offered a role that actually paid him a salary: as a hit man in Murder, Inc. (Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg, 1960), a film which chronicles the rise and fall of the organized crime syndicate known as Murder, Incorporated. Fischer, Robert and Wilfried Reichart. Blast of Silence rates: His writing and directional credits include successful television productions in the 1970s and 1980s such as, The Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, The Brady Bunch, MASH, Dynasty, and many others. Waldo Salt was to subsequently win two Oscars, for the screenplays of Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978) respectively (Terrance Rafferty). Throughout Blast of Silence, there has been a prevailing sense of fatalism, which has ultimately culminated in Frankie Bono’s brutal death. This scene, in particular, seems clearly influenced by the French New Wave. As he explains, “…I was the best actor available to me at the time, and I was the only one I could afford. And the narration, which is designed to be a Greek chorus, his alter ego, alludes to the fact that I could have been an engineer, could have been many things, and in this case, even God. But what's this unknown thing called Blast of Silence? Baby boy Frankie Bono. At the restaurant, fate will intervene in Frankie’s life in the form of Petey (Danny Meehan), an old childhood friend from the orphanage. Baron emphasizes that any resemblance between the two films is “pure coincidence” (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart). After dinner, Frankie’s edgy, pent-up emotional state will become uncontrollable when he aggressively embraces Lori, and then pins her down as they fall to the floor. The full frame compositions look both loose and shapeless, and sure enough, when matted off on a widescreen monitor everything is framed handsomely. Other than that, I knew nothing about formal editing, although I understood it instinctively due to my art background. An added insert is a brief graphic comic treatment by Sean Phillips, in a style that simply reproduces frames from the film. At the time of its release, Blast of Silence was generally well received, with one London newspaper (The Evening News & The Star) even beginning its review of the film with a reference to Allen Baron: “Is this the new Orson Welles?” (Allen Baron). As an engineer designing a bridge. For example, as Frankie walks briskly along the downtown streets of Harlem, biding his time before the hit, Merrill Brody’s documentary-like gritty cinematography, overlaid with Meyer Kupferman’s edgy vibraphone-laden jazz score, and Lionel Stander’s voiceover narration are skillfully combined to mirror Frankie’s inner thought processes. Hands cold. As Baron recalls, “Before I got into the film business, I was an artist. While Frankie’s behaviour towards Lori can be viewed as emblematic of a profession that condones the use of violence and the suppression of feelings and emotions, it could also be construed as symptomatic of a condition that originates from birth. Your hands are hot remembering the hot sweaty hands of the mother superior holding you.”. Volume 24 Issue 5-6-7 / July 2020 You’re a loner. The disembodied voice addresses Bono at length in the second person, a form seldom used in noir. Expert. Galleries of on-set Polaroids, more location comparison photos and a (rather good) original Universal trailer are included as well. Having become lonely and alienated from the world around him, Frankie drops his guard and allows his personal life to overlap with his professional life. Three months later, in October 1990, Baron revisited many of the New York locations used in the film with a German film crew, which resulted in a 60-minute documentary entitled: Requiem For a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart, 2007) (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart). With the prospect of an upfront salary, Falk decided to take the role in Murder, Inc., which was to prove an important stepping-stone in his career. If one must go the art-movie route, the immediate comparison might be with Robert Bresson: the spare production, the lonely anti-hero. He was an expert at what he knew, which was killing. Then slowly a tiny pinprick of light begins to emerge from the centre of the screen. Quiet little community. Nevertheless, the French New Wave seems to have been a stylistic influence on one of the most memorable scenes in Blast of Silence. Eight pounds, five ounces. But Allen Barron's spare narrative and nihilistic attitude clearly blazed the trail for the likes of Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese and other makers of films about mean city streets. When people look at you baby boy Frankie Bono they see death. It is evident that they know each other from the past. The busy streets are crowded with families, and children gather around brightly lit shop front windows. Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important, something special. Although having no formal training in how to make a movie, Allen Baron nevertheless began to apply his visual language skills as a cartoonist and illustrator to the filmmaking process. With the rediscovery of Blast of Silence, film critics have dubbed the relentlessly bleak, fatalistic tone of the film, and the moody black and white location shooting as hardboiled film noir, a term originally coined by the French to describe those dark urban crime dramas which first appeared in Hollywood at the end of the Second World War [Exemplified by films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), and many others]. The importance of Merrill Brody’s atmospheric black and white cinematography in Blast of Silence is also evident early in the film when Frankie rendezvous with the Contact Man (Charles Creasap) onboard New York’s Staten Island Ferry (which runs between the boroughs of Manhattan and Staten Island). They’ll be a gun in them soon. He even brings a Christmas present for her. As the snowstorm swirls around him, Frankie is cornered and shot, falling headlong into the cold, murkiness of the creek. Frankie is also becoming increasingly delusional. Which amused me, because I didn’t see that film until about two years after I did _Blast of Silence_” (Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart). As Frankie pensively walks the streets, he draws on his experiences as a youth growing up in an orphanage to justify killing Troiano, with Stander’s voiceover narration declaring, “The sisters of the orphanage used to say, ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’ Sometimes you wonder if he moved you in to rid the world of men like Troiano.” These scenes also offer a fascinating encapsulation of an era; a gritty snapshot of life on the streets of Harlem, circa 1960. On Christmas Day, Frankie decides to visit Lori at her apartment. As Baron observes, “On this barge that he came to purchase a gun, he was conducting what was, for him, a normal business transaction. No one else. Over the noise of the train, the narration makes some sharp statements about birth, life and death, like Beat Poetry. Took a slap in the backside to blast out the scream. But a change of artistic direction came in 1951 with a fortuitous invitation to a sound stage at Paramount. In fact, Baron’s friend, Peter Falk, had originally agreed to play Frankie for a deferred salary (Falk was to become well known in the 1970s for his role as the rumpled, raincoat-wearing, cigar-smoking investigator in the long-running US crime series Colombo).

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