Murder by Contract

source: Murder by Contract

Murder by Contract is directed by Irving Lerner and written by Ben Simcoe. It stars Vince Edwards, Philip Pine, Michael Granger, Caprice Toriel and Herschel Bernardi. Music is by Perry Botkin and cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Claude (Edwards) one day decides he's had enough of being a regular Joe earning regular Joe wages. He decides to become a hit man, and after enacting a few clinical kills he works his way into the confidence of the mysterious Mr. Brink. This earns him a "big hit" in Los Angeles, where he is to snuff out the main witness in a big upcoming trial. All is going well until he finds out the target is a woman, so where once Claude was calm and assured, he now becomes irritable and irked... With the help of its appearance on the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics DVD set, and a certain Martin Scorsese proclaiming it as one of the biggest influences on his career, Murder by Contract is getting the exposure it so dearly deserves. An odd, even kooky type of noir flavoured picture, it's a film that is like many of the late 50s film noirs that don't have the classic noir look. It's light, airy and set predominantly on the salty sea climes of the West Coast of America. It's with the characters, or in this case mainly the central character, where many of these "lighter" shot 50s crime movies get their noir worth. And Murder by Contract is a beaut in that respect. He doesn't like guns! For two parts of the running time it's a film oozing a sense of cool. Claude proves to be a calm and methodical protagonist, his dialogue sparkles with intelligence and sophistication, he knows the world and his place within it. Words like existentialism and spare, the latter of which Scorsese uses a lot, are words bandied about frequently in conjunction with Lerner's (City of Fear) movie. Those words signify how much of a great job Lerner and Ballard did, where shot in 7 days with a minimal budget they have crafted a picture of unique quality, where maximum impact is garnered from such minimal space and sequences. Perry Botkin's score also aids the oddness on offer, predominantly electric guitar based, it's a fusion of The Third Man and Zorba the Greek, unsettling and at odds with a hit man based yarn, yet sneakily putting a sense of disquiet into the mix. I don't like pigs! It's with the last third where film really comes alive, both physically and psychologically. Once Claude gets to Los Angeles and hooks up with Mr. Brink's men, Marc (Pine) & George (Bernardi), who are babysitting him while he enacts the hit, things change drastically. Marc and George are in turn fascinated and irritated by Claude's calmness, tagging along as Claude takes in the sights, gets a bit of R&R and generally chills out. But then it's revealed that the target is a woman and Claude changes, he become unglued. He tells all that a woman is not dependable, he wants double the money or he's not doing it. It's then where we realise there's Freudian repressions lurking underneath the once icy calm exterior. We recall his outburst upon finding lipstick on a cup, his irritation at the party girl sent to his room for company, again lipstick an issue. There's emotional scars and these are further given a scrape during the finale as Claude desperately tries to finish the job, his repressions leading to classic film noir closure. A terrific little "B" noir, excellently constructed and acted, with dashes of uniqueness and sly characterisations. 8.5/10

Apparently Martin Scorsese speaks highly of this overly stylised late noir, obviously very low-budget feature directed by Irving Lerner and starring 60's American TV's future Dr Ben Casey, Vince Edwards as a cold calculating assassin for hire, with the improbable name of Claude, who apparently turns to contract killing to helpself buy a nice house! Available for hire at literally $500 a pop, we firstly see him coolly despatch a victim at a barber-shop, then a helpless hospital patient and finally the guy who hired him in the first place to suitably establish his credentials to the big boss who soon enough commissions him to take out a prime witness in a big criminal case before it goes to trial. To assist him in the hit, he's assigned two minders, one a be-hatted and bespectacled, pacifying older man, the other an impatient, flighty younger man who both accompany him to Los Angeles, where the target is holed up in a hotel under police protection. Along the way, we learn that Claude is very much a loner, spurning company, even women, meticulous in his planning and ruthless in the execution of his jobs, although we learn that he prefers not to use guns in his work and crucially, has an aversion to contracts to kill women. That's pretty much the plot but with an ending obviously still constrained by the Hays Code, although we do see one woman shot, much of the film centres on Claude reconnoitering the job and building an uneasy relationship with his shadows, Mutt and Jeff (not their given names). Personally I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I liked Edwards as the handsome lead and the L.A. locations but found the pacing jerky and felt that there were unconvincing plot leaps and mixed acting by the rest of the cast. I didn't get much of a noir vibe either and I hated the alternative-surf musical accompaniment in almost every scene. All I can say is that if this was what you get when you cross new wave with film noir, I wasn't much impressed. All I saw really was a rushed-looking, cheaply made potboiler. Sorry, Marty.

A B-movie and something of a small classic comparable to Melville's "Le Samourai" which it may have influenced. Vince Edwards in his pre-Ben Casey days is the young man who actually wants to be a contract killer and the movie is about his somewhat clinical initiation into the job. Superbly written by Ben Simcoe, brilliantly photographed in black and white by Lucien Ballard and with a terrific yet simple score by Perry Botkin this movie comes close to perfection. It was directed by Irving Lerner who up to then hadn't really done anything of note, (perhaps he was just waiting for the right material). Edwards is superb as the almost overly confident killer who comes undone when he has to kill a woman. It's a very simple picture, in which almost all the killings are kept off-screen concentrating instead on the killer's psychology and how he goes about his work. Never a commercial success it has now build up a considerable cult following.

Claude (Vince Edwards) is a young man with a regular job, no history of trouble with the law and no chance of making any real money. He also has the brains and emotional detachment to make the big bucks as a hit man, and that becomes his new job title. A string of successful hits gets him sent to Los Angeles for his latest job. There he is accompanied by two goons: one who is perpetually nervous and the other who quickly worships the young man as a hero. The cold, ruthless hit man finally becomes unglued when he finds out that his latest target is a woman. She's a witness, set to testify against his boss, and guarded day and night by the police. It's her femininity that worries Claude: women are unpredictable, they don't do what you expect. Claude eventually proves that he is the unpredictable one and his own worst enemy. This quirky crime film has the usual symptoms of a low budget and a tight shooting schedule: some poorly written scenes, poorly acted scenes and plot holes. But much of it works very well, especially the opening sequences depicting Claude's unusual job interview and his initial series of hits. I especially liked how the barber shop murder was handled. Vince Edwards is good in the lead, though he's better when he's not forced to mouth pretentious monologues that lay on the irony a bit too thick. (At one point I was reminded of Charlie Chaplin's fatuous comments about murderers versus soldiers in "Monsieur Verdoux.") The spare electric guitar score is effective. It's worth watching, especially since Martin Scorsese has acknowledged it as an influence on his films, notably "Taxi Driver."

I first saw this movie when I was a kid and had a crush on Vince Edwards as Ben Casey. Well I am all grown up, no longer have a crush, and still think this movie was excellent for its time. The cold blooded approach of Edwards character Claude, his lack of affect, makes him more menacing than those shouting gun waving villains you usually see in film. This guy knows his job and that's all it is, a job. The music is so monotonous it fits the characters attitude (or lack of one). Even the other bad guys in the film know there is something not quite right about their hired gun. I liked it. Whenever it's on I make it point to try and catch at least some of it.

The gay lovers in "The Big Combo" are a fascinating touch. The relationship between Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in "The Lineup" is complicated and intriguing -- and plausible. But back then, homosexuality was still classified as a form of psychiatric illness. And in those two films, as well as in the one at hand, we have gay hit men. Are the portraits meant to include gay men in the mainstream or are they meant to suggest that one is the same as the other: being gay and being a killer? Please understand: I have no personal information about Vince Edwards. He was in the "Ben Casey" series before I had access to television and he became a star. Here, though he is the character of the title. And though he is not overtly gay, I have to think this movie was quite a turn-on for gay men in those repressed times: It opens with Edwards shaving while wrapped in a towel. We see him naked from the waist up, we see him in a bathing suit. Many times. And he is not only a hit man but he is also a loner. A meticulous loner. And he says on many occasions throughout the film that he dislikes women; that they have no place in the world. The movie itself is spare and fairly effective. If its equivalent were to come out today, it would likely play at Sundance. The primary female role is played as highly unsympathetic. She is also played as rather butch. So where does that leave us? More to the point, where did it leave the viewer in 1958? It isn't the sort of movie about gay men that came a little later in which they were either mocked or in which they committed suicide. But the characters are cold, soulless. That's kind of a broad generalization, isn't it?

Murder by Contract (1958) 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.

Murder By Contract was a strange film, but I really like something quirky now and then and this film noir had its quirks. I mean, dig that crazy music, man! The soundtrack reminded me of The Third Man with the zither, except here it was guitar. I found it so out-of-place that it was good that way. It got your attention and was effective in an odd manner. Vince Edwards' character, "Claude," a hit man with a lot of intelligence, was also fun to enjoy. His dialog, and just the way he carried himself through this film, was fascinating. My only disappointment was what he did - or did not do - at the end the film, but I understand why the movie ended as it did. I just thought it would be a perfect ending had they gone the other direction. I'm purposely being vague so as not to spoil things for those who haven't seen it. If you haven't, it is well worth watching, particularly if you're a fan of film noir. Although a low-budget "B" film shot in just seven days, this had a professional air to it with good acting, direction and photography. I'm glad to see Columbia Pictures do it justice by giving us a nice transfer in their "Columbia Pictures: Film Noir Vol. 1" box set, where this was made available. Not only did Edwards - a fine actor - achieve big fame a couple of years after this film was made with his mega-hit TV series, "Ben Casey," but Herschel Bernardi, one of the co-stars of this movie, did pretty well, too, by beginning his stint in TV's "Peter Gunn" later in this year (1958). Those two guys, along with Philip Pine, had plenty of small and large-screen work in their resumes. Did you know this movie was shot in seven days? Wow, it didn't have a rushed look to it. I wish there more of these late-50s noirs. Mixed in was the some of the slang of the '60s. I laughed out loud when someone mentioned "the fuzz," referring to the police. Man, I thought that was pure mid-t0-late '60s talk and was surprised to hear that in this 1958 film. This movie was full of surprises, and most of them were good ones.

Entertaining, low budget crime thriller. Vince Edwards was tailor made for the role of Claude, a cool and calculating hit-man who has to bump off a beautiful woman before she spills the beans to the authorities about a certain criminal King Pin. Edwards starred in several of these well crafted bargain basement efforts just before he became an international TV star as Dr Ben Casey. Stylish direction and some interesting camera work compliment a thoughtful script. Be watching for one particularly unsettling scene which unfolds in a barber shop. Masterfully underplayed but makes a lasting impact. Just like a sling - shot, this excellent little film is simple but highly effective.