Murder By Contract

 

Director Irving Lerner

 

MURDER BY CONTRACT      A                                                                                            USA  (81 mi)  1958  d: Irving Lerner

What really stands out in this independent film is how it so closely resembles the outline of Jean-Pierre Melville’s later film Le Samouraï (1967), where a studiously proficient hit man is all about meticulous planning and preparation, given a clinical, precise approach, becoming a ritualized, existential journey told with a cool detachment, yet given an American twist, especially when the locale switches to sunny Los Angeles.  Shot in just seven days, this is reportedly one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite B-movies, and Lerner was a supervising editor who died during the making of Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), so that film was dedicated to him.  An early member of the Workers Film and Photo League (USA), a group of radical filmmakers whose newsreels documented the era’s labor unrest during the first half of the 1930’s, Lerner was a photographer and editor, also a film critic for New Masses and New Theatre, both left wing journals, publishing under the pseudonym Peter Ellis, and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but revived his career as a director and editor in Hollywood, as he was known as a fixer who could re-edit seemingly failed or wayward projects, working as an uncredited editor and second unit director on Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960).  A close friend of Fritz Lang, he worked as an assistant to Lang on You and Me (1938), introducing him into the left-wing New York intelligentsia, where Lang was also blacklisted in the early 50’s due to his known working relationship with German playwright Bertolt Brecht and other known communists, spending a year and a half clearing his name during the Red Scare. Written by Ben Simcoe and an uncredited Ben Maddow, who in 1936 co-founded the short-lived left wing newsreel The World Today before becoming known as a virtual invisible man, eventually blacklisted, working under the front of Philip Yordan, who never wrote a single line.  Like many other blacklisted screenwriters, Maddow survived by writing scripts under assumed names and making uncredited contributions to a variety of films, though he never regained his stature after the blacklist.   This film, however, is uniquely compelling, featuring a wonderfully inventive and playful guitar theme by Perry Botkin (longtime bandleader for Bing Crosby!) that recalls the zither music in Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949), instantly providing a constantly changing state of mind, as if various musical themes are built around different characters who are thrown into the same ever-constricting space, tightening the grip of atmospheric suspense.  The music also introduces audiences to Vince Edwards as Claude, a contract killer, Murder By Contract -- (Movie Clip) Opening Credits - Turner ... YouTube (1:19), who views his profession as just another job, a business like any other, impeccably dressed in a suit and tie each day, always looking sharp, with the film moving forward with an economy of style and a surprisingly spare efficiency, exuding a cinéma vérité realism with a natural look, less about narrative and more about exploring his internal struggles, where it stands out as something completely different.  Released the same year as Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958), predecessors to not only Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960), and the coming French New Wave, but also Seijun Suzuki’s BRANDED TO KILL (1967), the film noir cinematography is provided by Lucien Ballard, best known for his collaboration with Sam Peckinpah, beautifully realized in black and white with offbeat stylistic flourishes.

Despite the grim nature of the subject matter, which is an extension of postwar despair, there are hilarious deadpan moments that come out of nowhere, literally gifting the audience with something much more appealing than we expect, while the scintillating performance by Vince Edwards really stands out, something of a revelation in his methodical sense of detachment that is chillingly cold and calculating.  Best known for his rather wooden 60’s TV role as Dr. Ben Casey (Lerner directed over a dozen episodes), he’s allowed to really extend his range here in an outrageously subversive take on a model citizen who otherwise follows the law in every respect, not wanting to draw any unwanted attention, yet he devises a harebrained, get-rich quick scheme (only in America!), where it’s hard not to identify with the intelligence of his character even knowing the gruesome nature of his profession.  None of the killings occur on camera, where this is more about everything leading up to those moments, told in a surgically precise, yet extremely spare style of existential noir that became a staple of French films.  Early on we see him in a job interview, where the potential employer, Mr. Moon (Michael Granger), feigns disinterest, checking him out, observing his reactions, while Claude’s curt replies and surprising directness are contrasted against a polite and respectful tone that suggest he’s a consummate professional, where he aspires to be a contract killer because he wants the money to afford a respectable middle class life, Murder By Contract -- (Movie Clip) Interview - Turner Classic ... YouTube (3:05).  We never learn much about Claude, who remains something of a mystery, living a monk’s life, yet he’s trained himself to go about his business without any emotion, with as few distractions as possible, keeping a clear head and a well-toned physique, as we see him in his hotel room doing a series of workout exercises while he awaits a call for his services, "Murder by Contract" (1958): "Waiting for the Call" Montage YouTube (2:34), something Scorsese borrowed for Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver - Workout Scene YouTube (1:17).  Passing the first tests with flying colors, Murder By Contract (1958) -- (Movie Clip) You Are Next  YouTube (3:17), he’s sent to the West Coast for a top priority assignment, the kind only few are chosen to handle, requiring plenty of advanced preparation and nerves of steel.  Getting off the train, he’s met by two henchmen in a convertible who will stick with him until he finishes the job, offering any assistance he needs, yet they couldn’t be more different.  George (Herschel Bernardi) is calm and relaxed, willing to be helpful and supportive, giving the man plenty of space, while Marc (Phillip Pine) is always on edge, a nervous wreck who can’t understand why he doesn’t just jump right into it, growing ever more irritated by each day that passes without any sign of interest to carry out what he’s been hired to do.  Instead Claude is mesmerized by the Pacific Ocean and the sunshine, watching surfers, going swimming, hitting golf balls at the range, and even enjoys some deep sea fishing, never once asking about his contract, instead becoming something of a sightseeing tourist which just drives Marc nuts, so the three of them play out like some sort of Greek chorus of contrasting emotions, where it appears that Claude is amusingly stringing them along for his own entertainment, but he’s just scoping them out.  As if forced to defend his detached nonchalance, “I wasn’t born this way,” he says.  “I trained myself.  I eliminated personal feelings.”

There’s a running line of philosophical ruminations in this film, with Claude continually pondering what it means to kill someone, “It’s business.  The same as any other business — you murder the competition.  Instead of price cutting, it’s throat cutting.  Same thing,” drawing comparisons to what he does for a living and soldiers who are legally trained to kill others, often given a medal for their heroicism.  What about the airplanes that drop bombs causing huge numbers of civilian casualties.  None of the pilots are arrested, yet he would be for killing a single target.  When he goes into a warehouse gun shop, the place is filled with rifles, ammunition, and weapons of all kinds, describing it as “a warehouse full of murder,” yet he’s the one labeled a murderer.  This philosophical take on the moral dilemmas of a contract killer is an interesting train of thought that doesn’t make it into very many movies, then or now, way ahead of its time in the safe and conservative Eisenhower era of the 1950’s, where the psychological aspects of this film are cutting edge, with the killer viewing himself as a kind of Nietzschean superman who is far superior to anyone else around him.  There are no gangsters or criminal stereotypes here, just people trying to make a buck in a non-traditional manner, suggesting an underbelly of the safely conventional surface of middle class America, much like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986).  Even more surprising is the sex of the target, as it’s a nervous, chain-smoking woman holed up in the Hollywood Hills, Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel in her only screen appearance), a former night-club piano player turned state’s witness, having witnessed a murder from a high-profiled mobster who now wants her snuffed out before she can testify in court, Caprice Toriel smoking – "Murder by Contract" (1958) YouTube (2:24).  While she’s bossy, ungrateful, and angry at having to be cooped up with cops for her own protection, she’s a stark contrast to the calm-under-pressure Claude who finally starts taking an interest in the job, but is thrown for a loop when he discovers his target is a woman living in a near impregnable fortress, causing a sudden crack in his cool façade, not the measured, analytical thinker we’re used to seeing, while his misogynist attitudes toward women are extreme and a little goofy, where she’s suddenly thrown him off his game.  Things go a little haywire after that, growing more moody and deliriously over the edge, even taking a trip into Charlie Chaplin’s former movie studio on La Brea, now sitting abandoned and empty, the perfect place for things to spin out of control.  Like any good noir thriller, locations are key to providing atmospheric tension, and Los Angeles has a bounty of out-of-the-way places that unexpectedly turn up in movies, Murder By Contract (1958) -- (Movie Clip) You Talk Like A ... YouTube (3:17), paving the way for all the LA noir thrillers of the 70’s, like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), or Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER (1978).  While the film was once obscure and rarely screened, audiences may be drawn into the boldly naïve assurance and wide-eyed attitude of Claude’s youthful ambitions to get ahead in his twisted version of the American Dream, with the camera following him wherever he goes, continually flaunting middle class values, instilling an idea of comfortable familiarity, yet when we see him crawl through a drainage pipe, we can’t help but recall similar scenes of Orson Welles running through the sewer in THE THIRD MAN, though this is a much more no frills, low-budget version, where a sociopathic fatalism is deeply entrenched into the fabric of this film.

Martin Scorsese on Murder by Contract (1958) YouTube (5:01)

Noir Alley: Murder By Contract (1958) intro 20200614 Eddie Muller introduction on TCM, YouTube (4:45)   

Murder By Contract 1958 Vince Edwards & Phillip Pine entire film on YouTube (1:20:29)

The Killing

Director Stanley Kubrick on the set

Kubrick with Sterling Hayden

Kubrick sandwiched between Kola Kwariani (left) and Sterling Hayden

Kubrick (left) with Vince Edwards and Marie Windsor

Sterling Hayden with Marie Windsor

THE KILLING          A                    

USA  (83 mi)  1956 d:  Stanley Kubrick

The film that put Kubrick on the map, released by the studio as the second film in a double-feature, shot in just 24 days on a B-movie budget of only $320,000, elevated from the forty thousand he had to work with to film KILLER’S KISS (1955), but a flop financially, yet critics acknowledged a spectacular young talent, and the first Kubrick film to be adapted from another source.  The director was particularly impressed by the time structure in Lionel White’s 1955 crime thriller Clean Break, as White was the master of the heist gone wrong novel.  Even after 60 years, this is still a perfectly conceived film classic, a 50’s black and white film noir suspense thriller with voiceover narration and an unusual overlapping time structure that goes back and forth in time, starring Sterling Hayden at the top of his game as the bold and brash ringleader Johnny Clay, the recently released ex-con who plans a perfect heist at the Lansdowne Racetrack for $2 million smackeroos (actually shot at the Bay Meadows Racetrack just outside of San Francisco), assembling a five-man team of novices, an oddly devised collection of outsiders and luckless misfits, all driven by a desperate craving for money as the answer to all their prayers, where the ingenious scheme is carried out perfectly in a tightly planned time schedule until, little by little, everything unravels.  There is terrific dialogue written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson (who felt cheated over his secondary “additional dialogue” credit, claiming he wrote most of the screenplay), great acting from a collection of B-movie standouts, loaded with suspense and atmosphere, as well as huge doses of humor, and while it’s beautifully realized by the constant handheld camera movement of cinematographer Lucien Ballard who actually got his start working with Josef von Sternberg in the mid 30’s, eventually working with Sam Peckinpah, shooting The Wild Bunch (1969), mostly shot in and around Los Angeles, there were severe disagreements between the 27-year old director and the camera crew, as Kubrick was insistent upon adhering to his own compositional vision, shooting the aftermath of the shootout scene himself, which Martin Scorsese may have had in mind in Taxi Driver (1976).  The ingeniously complex narrative structure feels like a flashback film, yet there are no flashbacks, as the story is simply told out of order, with the dry voice of a narrator providing a 3^rd person newsreel style accounting of what’s taking place in each sequence, recalling the March of Time newsreels that Kubrick directed, specifying the exact time of the action, transmitting expository information, keeping viewers detached from the central drama, giving the film a documentary style depiction, each segment feeling like a story within a story.  The first few sequences are particularly illuminating, as they introduce the main characters, while also providing multiple levels of character motivation, delving into their inner psychology, revealing a fairly atypical gang of thieves, including two insiders.  Johnny and his girl Fay (Coleen Gray) set the stage, as she’s a complete contrast from the usual femme fatale role, instead showing an intense devotion to Johnny.  Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), the track bartender, has a bedridden wife at home, while the crooked cop, Officer Randy Kennan (Ted de Corsia), is up to his ears in debt to loan sharks, while George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr.), a half-pint window teller at the track, is in over his head in a masochistic relationship to his disinterested, money-grubbing wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), spilling the beans to her about the upcoming heist while she’s two-timing him with another man, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), who then wants a piece of the action.  The odd man out is Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), whose bankroll is financing the operation, with suggestions of a homoerotic subtext with Johnny.    

In addition, Johnny has hired two specialists to perform specific functions that are not part of the five-way split, knowing nothing about the overall operation, and paid up front not to ask questions.  Professional wrestler and chess master (and philosopher) Kola Kwariani plays Maurice, paid to start a fight with the bartender and create a disturbance, distracting track cops from the heist taking place, while oddball movie psychopath Timothy Carey is Nikki Arane, a lunatic gun nut and sharpshooter, is paid to shoot the lead horse during the high stakes race, creating yet another distraction, slowing the crowd’s mad dash to collect their winnings.  Influenced by the success of John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), it spawned a whole subset of crime heist movies, all exploiting a headlines-grabbing event, the January 1950 robbery of the Brinks Armored truck office in Boston, at the time the largest heist in American history.  The Halloween mask that Johnny uses for the crime mirrors the method used by the Brinks robbers.  While Sterling Hayden is connected to Huston’s film, appearing as a gunman, three members of this cast, Hayden, Ted de Corsia and Timothy Carey, appeared together the previous year in the low-budget noir film, André de Toth’s Crime Wave (1954), also featuring a near documentary style, while the art director, Ruth Sobotka, was Kubrick’s wife at the time, who amazingly drew charcoal drawings of every scene for the actors to study.  This film’s hard-boiled script represents a giant leap forward in quality from his earlier work, with Kubrick masterfully accentuating the meticulous precision needed to carry out this master heist, billed as the perfect crime, eventually thwarted by human fallabilities, a theme returned to frequently by Kubrick, including LOLITA (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), where most of his career, with the exception of Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957) or Spartacus (1960), Kubrick displayed a preference for flawed protagonists who aren’t particularly virtuous or admirable, finding anti-heroes who are by no means sympathetic.  Despite Hayden’s rock solid performance as the tight-lipped, perfectly chiseled, hard-nosed protagonist, emulating the virile masculinity of film noir, we never penetrate his inner psyche, knowing nothing about his backstory other than the knowledge he served 5 long years in prison, so while he has his appeal (and legions of followers), the film itself is tinged with an existential noirish fatalism, with the narrator at one point informing viewers that this could be the last day in Johnny’s life, reminded at every turn how easily things could go off the rails, where instead of one man standing out, the beauty of the film is the emphasis on the coordinated planning and execution, where each one is an essential cog in the overall success of the plan, continually offering shifting points of view.  Young gun Quentin Tarantino was so enthralled with the nervy Kubrick style, not just Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but the climax in Jackie Brown (1997) all emulate what Kubrick does in this film, each one showing different character’s perspectives told out of order, drawing comparisons to Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950), actually receiving a call of support from Marlon Brando afterwards who was impressed by such a distinctive style from a first-time filmmaker.         

While Johnny is singled out with more screen time, as he is the brains behind the operation, it’s curious that no character in the film, including the omniscient narrator, is fortunate enough to have all the information, as each have knowledge of only certain parts of the overall operation as it unfolds, leaving viewers in the most advantageous position, as we see all.  Johnny, for instance, never sees Nikki shoot the lead horse Red Lightning, or sees the cop drive away with the money, or hears the revealing conversations between Sherry and Val opening up a new can or worms, and he is excluded from the startling revelations at their meet site afterwards, arriving late, seeing one of the men covered in blood staggering to his car, beating a hasty retreat away from danger.  Viewers, on the other hand, see every aspect of the robbery, and are privy to the intimate conversations between lovers, which is what makes the jagged storyline all the more intriguing, curious to see how it all plays out.  While the film uses the conventions of 1940’s film noir, wrapped in a fog of an all-encompassing fatalism, filled with archetypal characters that we immediately recognize, it’s the unfamiliar elements Kubrick brings to the story that are most fascinating, where he expertly blends the familiar with the unfamiliar, something he does with all his films, no two of which are the same, combining elements of classical Hollywood with a more modernist technique, always finding new material that stands on its own, becoming something we’ve never really seen before.  Other films have used fragmented narrative methods before, but not to the extent that it becomes the organizing principle of the film aesthetic.   Members of the gang rarely see one another during the course of the heist, becoming glaringly obvious when they do intersect, if only for a brief moment, using double takes, returning again and again to the same moment in time, but from a different perspective, pushing the conventional obsession with time to the breaking point, with Kubrick literally replaying his narrative, continually accumulating more clues, creating a puzzle for the audience to piece together, where the fragmentary structure only heightens the interest.  The taut manner in which it all unfolds, with near mathematical precision, provides a good likelihood that they can ultimately get away with it, even if they are an unlikely group of small timers, and they very nearly do pull it off.  If not for a Hitchcockian device so brilliantly used in The Birds (1963), introducing a persnickety old woman in her 80’s, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), as a know-it-all who views herself as an ornithological expert, insisting “Birds are not aggressive creatures,” while here Kubrick introduces another chatty old grandmother (Cecil Elliott) at the airport, holding a diminutive poodle that she obviously spoils and dotes upon, but allows the poodle to escape and erratically create enough havoc at the airport terminal that Johnny’s dreams simply evaporate into thin air.  So close, and yet so far.  Like the crime itself, it’s an almost perfect film experience.   

The Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick • Cinephilia & Beyond