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)

Le Samouraï

 

poster of Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows

Director Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville on the set

Alain Delon

Melville directing the Delon couple

site of burned down Jenner Studios

LE SAMOURAÏ          A                                                                                                        France  (105 mi)  1967  d: Jean-Pierre Melville           

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... perhaps...                                                                                                                                      —Bushido (Book of the Samurai), fictional opening screen title

With the recent death of French actor Alain Delon, whose unnerving beauty made him a transfixing screen presence, it’s worth a look back into what is arguably his greatest role.  Seemingly drawn from Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Truffaut’s SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960), and Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), with the minimalist style reflecting the emotional state of the characters, or even further back with the professional killer of Alan Ladd in Frank Tuttle’s THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942), whose solitary ferocity made him such a unique character on the cinematic landscape, or the well ahead of its time, existential cool of Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contract (1958), yet the real roots would have to be the stunningly choreographed police procedural of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where an elusive killer is chased not only by the police but by the criminal underworld.  Made during the Summer of Love and the psychedelic era of the 60’s, this grim, downbeat effort remains one of the most influential films in history, as it so elegantly and stylishly exists in its own universe, completely cut off from the real world surrounding us, where the fatalism is as thick as the atmospheric gloom of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  Often regarded as the godfather or spiritual father of the French New Wave, known for shooting on location as early as the 40’s, something that was simply not done, even making a brief appearance in Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), where he utters the unforgettable line, “My dream is to become immortal, and then die,” but more importantly behind the scenes it was Melville who taught Godard how to utilize the infamous Jump cut to streamline his editing style, cutting directly to the best parts of the shot, snipping out any extraneous material in order to shorten the overall length of the film.  Melville was essentially a genre filmmaker, with a distinct attraction to the crime dramas of American film noirs, where that sparse existential style saturates his work and defines his aesthetic.  Coming from a rich history of struggling writers, cynical detectives, corrupt cops, or shadowy, down-on-their-luck figures who have been double-crossed, film noir offers an unusually sympathetic treatment of characters alienated from the social mainstream, often utilizing an existential, first-person voiceover narration, where nothing showcases the essence of the style more than a shot of Humphrey Bogart alone with his thoughts smoking a cigarette.  To that end, the film opens with Alain Delon alone in a drab, non-descript hotel room lying on his bed smoking a cigarette, with a made-up quotation acting as the lead-in to his most melancholy role as hitman Jef Costello, perhaps in honor of Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), completely isolated from the outside world, where other than repetetive chirps from a caged bullfinch bird sitting in the middle of the room and the sound of passing traffic in the rain, there is absolute silence, as the start of the film is completely dialogue-free for nearly ten minutes, where the pervasive silence is used to create an unnatural and unnerving atmosphere, Le Samourai | Opening Scene | Alain Delon | Jean-Pierre ... YouTube (3:24).  Immersed in the existentialism of the 50’s and 60’s, with very distinctive music by François de Roubaix, Delon is a doomed, tragic figure who remains faithful to a code of honor that is reminiscent of ancient samurai traditions, where nobody cares about them, nobody knows who they are, lost along their inner journey that feels like something out of Greek tragedy, with the highly influential Hong Kong director John Woo offering his take on the picture, “The closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.”  Now that’s some endorsement!

The beauty of the film is the degree to which the philosophies and personnas of actor Alain Delon and director Jean-Paul Melville are merged together in complete harmony with one another, as Delon is a stoic figure who rarely speaks, but is an impeccable planner, who has a moral code guiding his actions, but suffers through the loneliness of his solitary lifestyle, a predecessor to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), though fastidiously dressed in his trenchcoat and fedora.  An inscrutable gun for hire, we sympathize with his intellect and professionalism, while Melville eliminates every possible distraction, stripping the drama down to its bare essentials, where the characters say very little, expressing what they have to say through gestures, glances, and body language, while Paris is portrayed as cold and distant, exactly how Delon as Jef feels towards everything.  While he had already worked with Luchino Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and THE LEOPARD (1963), when the film was first released Delon was viewed in France as “boring,” where his vacant stare revealed nothing, with many critics complaining of an inability to read or understand this mysterious hitman, where even the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma complained about the casting of a colorless Alain Delon in the role, while also criticizing the film for a perceived lack of political engagement, which was all the rage the 60’s, yet that enigmatic aspect of his character is precisely what has carried this film’s reputation through the years, creating an elusive, yet alluring protagonist.  Melville has an unflashy yet unmistakable style that most closely resembles Dreyer or Bresson, though he gravitated to making crime films, where he somehow managed to combine his own culture with Eastern philosophy, which is why the Hong Kong audience was so responsive to his movies, where his signature style has influenced cutting edge directors like John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Johnny To, Takeshi Kitano, Aki Kaurismäki, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and the Coen brothers, while Ingmar Bergman was also an ardent admirer, yet his status as a filmmaker rests upon a reputation for defiance and taking risks.  As a youth, he devoured films, obsessed by French and Hollywood fare, but it was his wartime experience as a decorated veteran and Resistance activist that really shaped his fiercely pro-American sensibility, taking the pseudonym Melville as his secret code name to honor the American novelist, which he kept after the war, flatly rejected by multiple film schools, so he began his career working on the margins as an independent outsider, basically learning on the fly, forging his own path.  His directorial debut, LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1949), is adapted from a Resistance novella where Melville didn’t receive permission either for the book or from the film industry, made on a tiny budget, and takes place almost entirely in a single room, working with gifted cinematographer Henri Decaë, who at that time was a documentarian and industrial photographer, but would eventually become associated with New Wave filmmakers like Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960).  By the time Melville made this, his tenth film, coming twenty years after he broke into the industry, it is a distillation of all his cinematic obsessions, both thematic and stylistic, becoming intrinsically linked to what we think of today as the heritage of French cinema.

Interestingly, Jef is not a larger than life heroic figure, and while the camera intensely follows him wherever he goes throughout the entire picture, he’s wholly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, yet Melville’s clever use of camera, taut editing, and dramatic lighting continually draw attention to him, as he perpetually lurks in the shadows even in broad daylight, infused with a dark sense of romanticism, where we see nothing that belongs outside the frame of the film.  With no hint of the past, there is only the present.  When Jef finally leaves the room, the wet streets are lined with parked cars, choosing one that is unlocked, where he incredulously produces a gigantic ring of master keys that enables him to steal any Citroën DS, methodically trying each one until the ignition starts, A Scene from LE SAMOURAÏ YouTube (1:48), stopping by a dreary garage in the middle of nowhere to change licence plates on the car and procure a gun, a transaction that takes place wordlessly before speeding away to meet his girlfriend, Jane Lagrange (Nathalie Delon, the actor’s wife at the time, though they were divorced not long afterwards), who finally breaks the silence while he arranges a fake alibi.  But as she is meeting an older gentleman later in the evening, she will not be able to provide a complete alibi, so he visits a back room poker game afterwards for an alibi for the remainder of the night.  It quickly becomes clear what he has been assigned to do, visiting Martey’s, a popular jazz club, where he calmly and efficiently murders the owner, yet he’s seen in the hallway after the shooting by the black lounge pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier), Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville, Clip: Jef Costello ... YouTube (1:20), an alluring femme fatale who goes against the grain of what we expect, not manipulative or conniving in any respect, instead exuding a kind of warmth.  The Police Inspector, François Périer, is much more animated and talks a lot, perhaps best known as the Angel of Death who accompanies Orpheus into the underworld in Jean Cocteau’s ORPHÉE (1950), as he rounds up all the usual suspects and places them in a grandiose line-up that is lifted right out of John Huston’s ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), with potential witnesses sitting in the same room as the police ask if they recognize the murderer, suggesting this is really old school when it comes to police procedures, but Melville spends an inordinate amount of time in this scene, playing out in real time, apparently mesmerized by the silences and furtive glances as the Inspector meticulously runs through the suspects.  In a major surprise, Valérie insists she does not recognize Jef as the killer, compelling the police to release him, though he remains the prime suspect.  This is compounded by another shock, as Jef is shot while meeting the crime syndicate man sent to pay him for his services, the Man on the Bridge (Jacques Leroy), where the whole thing is a set-up, yet Melville prefers to film it in a very subdued, poetic way.  While it’s only a flesh wound, Melville highlights the very precise movements to dress the wound, remaining completely detached, utterly calm and composed, yet this transpires while another intricate psychological development is taking place in his head, as the syndicate is unhappy with his arrest, believing it draws too much unwanted attention to them, hiring another contract killer to take him out.  Meanwhile, in an ultimate irony, the police place a listening device in Jef’s apartment, yet the one thing you can count on is that he won’t say anything, so it’s a rather hilarious diversion that only accentuates the police ineptitude.    

Arguably the coolest scenes, again a throwback to Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), are the labyrinthian underground scenes of the Paris Métro, where the police have designed an extremely sophisticated surveillance operation to tail him through “the belly of Paris,” plotting his movements on a police-designed electronic subway map with flashing lights following his progress, trying to never lose him from their sight, using a legion of undercover operatives, both male and female, where Jef’s wits are uniquely challenged, as he has interiorized the subway map, knowing every single point of entry and exit, recalling a similar scene in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), yet here there are up to 70 police thrown into the mix, where the excess is clearly deliberate, giving Jef near superhuman powers to elude them all.  Lacking sympathetic characters, Melville is instead concerned with the meticulous choreography of ritualized events and the procedural nature of police activities, where so much emphasis in his films are concerned with physical movement, yet in a far different way than the comic playfulness of Jacques Tati, for instance, sharing more in common with the minimalism of Robert Bresson.  Released the same year as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the overall style and especially the endings couldn’t be more different.  We never see Jef interact with anyone else, no eating, no socializing, and even when an attractive woman in a car pulls up next to him, his eyes remain fixed forward.  The emptiness of Jef’s hotel room mirrors the emptiness of his own facial expressions, essentially revealing a core truth of his character.  While he is simultaneously being chased by both the police and the criminal underworld, there are many small details that are easily missed, with Melville de-emphasizing the obvious, choosing instead to rather abstractly present the storyline, such as the shooting on the bridge, with an immediate cutaway to a long shot where the acts are obscured.  While Melville did make films in color, he initially distrusted its use, believing it was too realistic, like an “inferior” aesthetic of television.  Even using vibrantly saturated color film, Melville preferred to shoot in muted colors, like gloomy, overcast weather, darkened hotel rooms, back alleys, a poorly lit car garage, underground subway trains, or a colorless police station, which are in stark contrast to the opulent living room of the lounge pianist he visits, as she may be the lover of the duplicitous man pulling the strings, so when he finally tracks down that crime boss, Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier), the colorful art on the wall and multi-dimensional, modernist space literally pops before our eyes, where it actually resembles the White Room at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Famously working outside the studio system, Melville built his own Studio Jenner in Paris, an abandoned factory converted in 1955, which burned down during the shooting of this film (with the director suspecting arson), losing both his home and his workplace, along with decades worth of scripts and eqiuipment. where he was forced to complete the project at Studios de Saint-Maurice, yet much like this film, it’s an ominous reference to Icarus flying too close to the sun, where in this world someone is always ready to double-cross you, where the police are as untrustworthy as the gangsters.  Just as in the Eastern samurai philosophy, the importance of death plays a central role, as the characters are literally driven by their closeness to the finality of the end, as their very existence is intertwined with this tragic fate.  Melville developed almost total creative control over his filmmaking, relying principally among a small group of collaborators, evolving into a very spiritual director with a unique vision, with his low-budget mode of production coming nearly a decade before the directors of the New Wave, who he both influenced and criticized, demonstrating how a uniquely personal technique could redefine for the rest of the world to see what “modern” French cinema would look like.    

Ginette Vincendeau on Jean-Pierre Melville  YouTube (18:44)

Le Samouraï: Jean-Pierre Melville's Work of Art   Edwin Adrian Nieves, YouTube (16:23)

Noir Alley - Le Samouraï (1967) intro 20240317  Eddie Muller introduction, YouTube (4:30)

Noir Alley - Le Samouraï (1967) outro 20240317   Eddie Muller post film comments, YouTube (4:35)