Film noir gem ‘Murder by Contract’ highlighted in new book

July 25, 2013 by

This summer, my friend Rob Elder released a new book (his sixth): The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love.

As Roger Ebert put it: “How necessary this book is! And how well judged and written! Some of the best films ever made, as Robert K. Elder proves, are lamentably all but unknown.”

It’s a great read and an invaluable reference tome for any serious film lover. To give you an idea of the treasures you will discover, Rob has kindly agreed to let me run an excerpt of the chapter in which he discusses “Murder by Contract” (a taut and chilling film noir) with director Antonio Campos.

Murder by Contract
1958, Directed by Irving Lerner. Starring Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine and Herschel Bernardi.

Claude (Vince Edwards) is an unusual hit man. He wasn’t born to the life, but instead he made himself a resourceful, calculating contract killer with an existentialist worldview. “He is so committed to his point of view and his philosophy that he’s developed—you respect that,” says Antonio Campos, who champions Murder by Contract. Campos praises the stylized off-camera hits, the economy of shots, and Edwards’s lead performance in this B-level noir film, shot in eight days.

That’s not to say he thinks it’s a perfect film. “What’s also charming about the film is that it is kind of a diamond in the rough,” Campos says. “Whatever rough edges Murder by Contract has are ultimately completely overshadowed by the brilliant dialogue and the commitment to a tone that was so ballsy.”

Antonio Campos, selected filmography:
Afterschool (2008), Simon Killer (2012)

Robert K. Elder: How would you describe Murder by Contract to someone who’s never seen it?
Antonio Campos: It’s a faithful noir film about a contract killer, from a time when not many films were made like that.

What made it special?
Campos: I remember vividly, I’d seen it at the Film Forum, and I remember feeling like I hadn’t seen anything like that in the program, and also I’d never seen anything like that outside of even contemporary film. Obviously there are contract-killer films now, but there was something about it, and the lightness, the light touch that it had, that really struck me as something very unique.

Let’s talk about the star, Vince Edwards, who was best known as the lead in TV’s hospital drama Ben Casey. Can you talk about him as a leading man?
Campos: The first time I ever saw Vince Edwards was in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). And I think he’s one of these B actors from that period. I was thinking about Vince Edwards and I was thinking about Timothy Carey in The Killing—they’re very specific kind of actors but could never be the classic leading man. Vince Edwards could be the leading man in that film, but he couldn’t be—he would never be—the movie star that he probably wanted to be. And I find those kinds of actors fascinating.

What does Edwards do in this role that makes him so magnetic, that pulls us through the film?
Campos: It’s his charisma as an actor. As a character, it’s the fact that he believes in something. As fickle as it may be, he has this amazing control. He is so committed to his point of view and his philosophy that he’s developed—you respect that.

If the film was made today, you’d have a little bit more violence to make the character a little more complex. You’re kind of rooting for him from the beginning.

Claude (Vince Edwards) is misanthropic but he has a heart and certain principles.

This is Edwards’s first film with Irving Lerner, a former documentarian, and shot in eight days.
Campos: What I find really interesting is that it isn’t a perfect film. It’s not a film that you watch and you think, “This guy is some brilliant unknown director!” What’s interesting is, for example, the first scene where Claude meets the character of Mr. Moon, that long shot that plays out. That felt like a very strong choice. It felt like Irving Lerner was in complete control of the way this film was made.

In Afterschool, many of your characters are also kept out of frame, especially in that first twenty minutes. Am I right to draw that parallel to Murder by Contract?
Campos: It wasn’t necessarily a direct influence. There was a certain kinship, I felt, with the way that he was approaching his composition.

My feeling about offscreen action and that fragmentation of characters is that you heighten the mystery and the tension because you’re holding back someone who feels very important to the story. Those moments in which the characters are offscreen or, for lack of a better word, decapitated by the frame, you almost make the universe of the film larger. In terms of Afterschool, you always felt like there was a bigger world outside of the frame that you wanted to see and also a bigger world outside of the frame that you couldn’t see. That, to me, is one of the things that can make a smaller film or a lower-budget film feel bigger.

Claude’s solitary nature is similar to Travis Bickle’s loner life in “Taxi Driver” by Martin Scorsese.

And one of the other parallels is the solitary nature of Vince’s character, especially inside his room—something it shares with the protagonist in Afterschool. Was that sequence influential?
Campos: Murder by Contract definitely could’ve played a sort of subconscious influence on me. I find that there are the filmmakers whose body of work I’ve become very familiar with, but then I’m aware of them influencing me. And then there are those one-off films that I see that subconsciously have made a greater effect on me that I don’t realize.

That particular sequence also influenced Martin Scorsese. Lerner’s austere training montage is reflected in Taxi Driver.
Campos: For Claude, it’s a job, and he’s had to train himself. He says many times that this is not the way he was born. He’s developed a certain coldness intentionally so that he can be a contract killer. Obviously, film noir was so much about antiheroes, and this is about someone who is a very cold-blooded killer and so calculated. The other thing that struck me is his point of view of the world that was quite misanthropic and quite cynical, but at the same time, he had a heart and he had certain principles that he was struggling with.

Why do you think we, as viewers, are drawn to the charismatic psychopath or sociopath?
Campos: We’re drawn to them when they’re done a certain way. Taxi Driver, for example, has Travis Bickle, and Bickle is the charismatic sociopath. At first, you sympathize with the fact that he is so disconnected and confused.

I don’t feel like they’re completely sociopaths. They have sociopathic tendencies or something, but deep down inside, there is a heart and humanity. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Noir Style, Out of the Shadows Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Murder by Contract,’ ‘Nightfall’ and ‘The Prowler’ close LACMA Mid-century California Noir series

May 29, 2012 by

Van Heflin

“Louis B. Mayer once looked at me and said, ‘You will never get the girl at the end.’ So I worked on my acting.” – Van Heflin

I’m glad he did. Heflin, one of my favorite ’40s/’50s actors, had charisma and presence to spare, even if he wasn’t classically handsome. A case in point is 1951’s “The Prowler” by Joseph Losey, which played Saturday night at LACMA, after “Murder by Contract” and “Nightfall,” the last in the Mid-century California Noir series.

My favorite was “The Prowler,” recently restored by UCLA and the Film Noir Foundation. Here, Heflin plays Webb Garwood, a sleazy cop who’s called to a posh, Spanish-style Los Angeles home by lovely and lonely Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) after she has a vague suspicion that an intruder is lurking in the garden. Turns out, there’s no one there, but Webb and Susan hit it off and soon begin an affair. Susan’s nights are often free because her DJ husband, John, is at the radio station broadcasting his show.

Evelyn Keyes, John Maxwell and Van Heflin in "The Prowler."

It’s a love triangle in the vein of “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” though here it’s Webb, not the femme fatale, who seizes the opportunity to do away with the wealthy husband and snag some money. Webb shoots John, apparently in the line of duty, leaving him free to marry Susan, ditch police work and move to Vegas.

When Susan announces she’s preggers, it crimps the plan rather a lot because the birth will reveal the true timing of their relationship. (This is actually a shocking plot turn because it reveals beyond a doubt that their relationship was sexual – other noirs hint at this, of course, but I can’t think of another example where it is so explicitly established. Not sure how they got that past the censors.) The two take off for a remote mountain town so she can secretly bear the child with no witnesses around. Once there, however, Webb reveals his knavish, venal nature and Susan takes action of her own.

Heflin perfectly inhabits this deeply flawed character, lending him charm and complexity, even making you sort of like him at times. He could play a snake so memorably – he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as a gangster’s pal in “Johnny Eager” and he was excellent in both “Possessed” with Joan Crawford and “Act of Violence,” where he played an Army traitor. Another noir highlight was playing Philip Marlowe on NBC radio in the late 1940s.

Heflin was just as adept at playing average Joes and good guys, most notably in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (a film noir with Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas), “Shane” and “3:10 to Yuma.”

Keyes’ Susan is no vampy seductress. Instead, she plays the character as written – bland, bored and slightly feckless. Perhaps a fish out of water in the big city; she and Webb bond because they both hail from Terra Haute, Ind., albeit from different sides of the tracks. Keyes conveys that Susan is more than just bored – she yearns for children and perhaps something more than she finds in her cushy but unhappy marriage. And to her credit Keyes completely abandons her glamorous exterior when she’s sweating it out in the mountains.

Dalton Trumbo relaxes in Cannes, 1971.

Blacklisted writers Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler produced the script based on a story by Robert Thoeren and Hans Wilhelm. Trumbo provided the voice for Susan’s DJ husband; he is completely uncredited on the film.

It’s a movie that grabs you quickly and doesn’t let go – a testament to Losey’s marvelous direction. Cahiers du cinema pointed to “The Prowler” as the moment Losey became a true auteur. And Losey, who suffered professionally because of his supposed ties to the Communist Party, put it this way: “‘The Prowler’ to me is, and always has been, a film about false values. About the means justifying the end and the end justifying the means. $100,000 bucks, a Cadillac and a blonde were the sine qua non of American life at that time and it didn’t matter how you got them.”

For me, “The Prowler” was the hit of the LACMA triple-bill, though “Murder by Contract” (1958, Irving Lerner) and “Nightfall” (1957, Jacques Tourneur) also made compelling viewing. In “Murder,” written by Ben Maddow and Ben Simcoe, luscious Vince Edwards gives a thoroughly haunting performance as a smart, precise, driven hitman; slick cinematography by the brilliant Lucien Ballard and original guitar music by Perry Botkin add to the mood of tension and doom. The film was a key influence on Martin Scorsese and “Taxi Driver.”

Evocative visuals and location shooting in LA and Wyoming, courtesy of Tourneur and first-rate cinematographer Burnett Guffey, make “Nightfall” easy on the eyes. Given that the movie is based on a David Goodis novel (Stirling Siliphant wrote the script), I was disappointed that I found myself drifting in and out of the slightly thin story. Perhaps a dynamic lead actor, like Van Heflin, could have injected more drama, but Aldo Ray as an innocent man on the run just didn’t do it for me. His one-note realization lacked depth and nuance.

That said, I liked Brian Keith as his bad-guy nemesis (Keith probably could have played Ray’s part quite well) and Anne Bancroft as Ray’s romantic interest, a model and sometime bar-fly. Chris Fujiwara, author of “The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur,” calls her “one of Tourneur’s most distinctive heroines.”

And any film noir that features a sumptuous fashion show at the Beverly Hills Hilton is more than all right by me.

“Murder by Contract” and “Nightfall” are available from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in the Film Noir Classics series; “The Prowler” from VCI Entertainment.

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Kubrick creates his defining template with ‘The Killing’

September 13, 2011 by

The Killing/1956/United Artists/85 min.

A DVD copy of “The Killing” from Criterion is this month’s Film Noir Blonde reader giveaway. Newly digitally restored, the two-disc set contains many extras, including Kubrick’s 1955 noir, “Killer’s Kiss,” also reviewed below.

By Michael Wilmington

It takes guts and brains to pull the perfect heist. Or to shoot the perfect heist movie.

In 1956, at the age of 28, Stanley Kubrick, a New Yorker who grew up in the Bronx, traveled to Hollywood and San Francisco to direct the movie that would not only make his reputation but would provide the template – the clockwork nightmare with humans caught in the machinery – that defines most of the films he made from then on.

A Kubrick self-portrait, 1950

Those later films include acknowledged masterpieces: “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), “2001: a Space Odyssey” (1968), “A Clockwork Orange” (1971). But none of them is more brilliantly designed or more perfectly executed than that inexpensive film, “The Killing.”

Kubrick and nonpareil pulp novelist Jim Thompson (“The Killer Inside Me”) wrote the script, based on Lionel White’s neatly plotted crime novel “Clean Break.” The great cinematographer Lucien Ballard (“The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond”) photographed the film.

That cast – a Who’s Who of noir types – includes Sterling Hayden (“The Asphalt Jungle”), Coleen Gray (“Kiss of Death”), Elisha Cook, Jr. (“The Maltese Falcon”), Marie Windsor (“The Narrow Margin”), Ted De Corsia (“The Naked City”), Timothy Carey (“Crime Wave”), James Edwards (“The Phenix City Story”), Joe Sawyer (“Deadline at Dawn”), Vince Edwards (“Murder by Contract”), Jay Adler (“Sweet Smell of Success”) and Jay C. Flippen (“They Live By Night”).

Perhaps inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 art-house classic “Rashomon,” Kubrick’s movie repeatedly circles back to the fictional Lansdowne race track (actually the Bay Meadows in San Francisco) during a fictional race. It’s a “jumbled jigsaw puzzle,” as one character calls it, that will supposedly end with a $2 million score of Lansdowne’s Saturday gambling receipts.

Immaculately orchestrated by a brusque criminal mastermind named Johnny Clay (Hayden), the heist kicks off when crack rifleman Nikki Arcane (Carey), shoots the favorite, Red Lightning, from a parking lot outside the track, at one of the turns. Thanks to Johnny, the robbery has been cleverly designed and planned to the last detail with each of the participants keenly aware of his part, executing it with precision and together getting away with the cash.

But like almost all great movie heists, like the robberies in “Rififi” and “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Le Cercle Rouge,” the one in “The Killing” has to unravel. And it does. The flaw in this system is the dysfunctional marriage between mousy cashier George (Cook, Jr., in his archetypal role) and George’s lazily sexy, unfaithful wife Sherry (Windsor, in hers).

Vince Edwards and Marie Windsor as the lovers.

George, desperate to keep his wayward wife interested, hints at an upcoming windfall. Sherry shares the leak with loverboy Val Cannon (Vince Edwards) – that has to be one of the great adulterous boyfriend movie names – and we can feel doom coming up fast on the outside.

The show clicked. It conquered audiences, especially critics. “The Killing” was immediately hailed by many as a classic of its kind, the very model of a high-style, low-budget thriller. “Kubrick is a giant,” said Orson Welles and it was the young Welles, of “Citizen Kane,” to whom the young Kubrick was most often compared.

If anything, his third feature’s reputation has grown over the years, as has the stature of the type of movie it embodies: the lean, swift, shadowy, cynical, hard-boiled crime genre we call film noir.

Also includes: “Killer’s Kiss”/1955/United Artists/67 min. This was Kubrick’s second feature and his first collaboration with producer James Harris. One of the most gorgeous-looking B movies ever, Kubrick shot in a style that effortlessly mixes the street-scene poetic realism of movies like “Little Fugitive” and “On the Waterfront” with film noir expressionism.

Jamie Smith plays a boxer in "Killer's Kiss."

But Kubrick’s script is subpar, mostly in the dialogue. It creaks, while his cinematography soars. A nearly washed-up boxer (Jamie Smith) falls in love with the woman across the courtyard (Irene Kane, aka Chris Chase), a dance hall girl who’s tyrannized by her obsessively smitten gangster boss (Frank Silvera).

The story sounds trite and that’s how it plays. But Silvera is good and the classy visuals give “Killer’s Kiss” a power that holds you. All Kubrick needed was a writer and a cast, and in “The Killing,” he got them.

Stanley Kubrick photo from Vanity Fair, courtesy of the Look Magazine Photograph Collection/The Library of Congress.

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