"You're Cold Now"

a blast of silence that keeps reverberating

Prax Gore sent me on a quest in the late winter of 1992.

I was doing a hellish string of comedy one-nighters in and around Madison, Wisconsin. Life-crisis nightclubs, abyss-adjacent hotel lounges and joy-free music venues. Most of the shows would get canceled before I could reach them. I spent a lot of time reading in motel rooms.

I bought a copy of Re:Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. Highly recommended. In the “Essays” section near the back of the book, Prax Gore wrote about an obscure little gangster/hitman film called Blast of Silence. “It looks cheap. It sounds cheap. It’s great”.

This was a year before I plunged headlong into my fascination with film noir. In those pre-internet, pre-streaming, pre-Everything Available All The Time days, I figured I’d rent Blast of Silence on videotape and see if Prax knew his stuff.

Well, no. Blast of Silence, like the characters in the world it depicts, was a true, shadowy obscurity in 1992. Six years went by, during which I became a film-geek snob. And no sign of Silence anywhere.

Then, in 1998, there it was – on pirated videotape at Cinephile in Santa Monica. But I refused to watch it. I was willing to hold out until it was screened, properly, in a theater.

In 2003 my patience paid off. At the American Cinematheque’s annual Film Noir Festival, a flawless, vault print of Blast screened at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. I canceled a gig in San Francisco so I could stay in town and watch it. Here’s what I wrote for the website AintItCool News, under the pseudonym “Mr. Molly”:

“You’re Cold Now”

Guess what, crime film junkies? Your Carnival of Souls was shown last night at the Egyptian here in Hollywood. That’s right – Allen Baron’s ultra-rare Blast of Silence had a screening, with the director/star/screenwriter in attendance, dishing his own flick!

Made in 1961 for $28,800, Blast rivals Seven, Juggernaut and Get Carter in the “bleak”-stakes. The plot is as simple as a diagram on a bar napkin. A hitman returns to his old neighborhood in Harlem to complete a contract, but is kneecapped by his own personal memories crashing in on him. The “blast” in the title refers to his own, self-wished death.

Schrader and Scorsese must have caught Blast of Silence at some time in their lives, because watching hitman “Baby Boy Frank Bono” prowl the night streets is like watching a rough draft of Travis Bickle. The voice-over narration (by an uncredited Lionel Stander, and not Baron – representing Bono’s colder, more idealized vision of himself) sounds like Travis forty years down the line.

The cinematography, by Merrill Brody, who also edited, is crisp, dark and menacing. Baron pointed out, pre-screening, that they had an early Arriflex, and no dolly (Brody had to weigh the tripod down with bags of sugar). The tracking shots, through Madison Square and Harlem, are terrific, even more so considering the resources.

There’s a superlative review of Blast in re/SEARCH’s Incredibly Strange Films, which is where I first read about it back in 1992. An eleven wait for a 77-minute black-and-white crime film? Worth it. Baron himself said, after the screening, “I’d give it a 10 for cinematography, and a 2 for story”.

He’s wrong. 10s all around, and a plea for someone to put this thing on DVD. What a blast. – MR. MOLLY

I’ve seen Blast of Silence half a dozen times since that screening in the early aughts. I wrote another essay about it for an issue of Ed Brubaker’s Criminal. The art for the essay, by Criminal artist Sean Phillips, wound up on the Criterion DVD release of Blast in 2008.

TCM is fond of showing Blast every year around Christmas (it’s set during the holiday season in early 60s Times Square, and plays like a perverse/reverse of It’s A Wonderful Life. Frank Bono is forever trapped in the version of earth where George Bailey, and indeed no one with any shred of goodness, was ever born). The Aero screened it in 2019 and I went with a friend, where we joined three other random people on a cold December afternoon for what felt like an anti-Christmas Eve mass).

As I write this, Allen Baron is 98 years old. He’ll have seen a century of life is he makes it to April 14th, 2027. After Blast of Silence he never had the film career he deserved — in a better universe he’d have been running alongside Rafelson, Coppola, Scorsese and Cassavettes through the 1970s and beyond. He still worked steadily — 3 more features and a ton of TV work. Twelve episodes of Charlie’s Angels, seventeen Love Boats, four Kolchaks —even two Brady Bunches! The episode where Peter’s voice cracks and Greg has to write “Time To Change” on the spot? The steady, pitiless film noir hand of Allen Baron brought that one in, kids.

He seemed so tickled, so happy, that night at The Egyptian. He was probably musing about the truly insane life he’d lived. I only recently found out that the film equipment he used to shoot Blast of Silence had been smuggled out of post-revolutionary Cuba by Allen himself. He’d previously worked as a second unit director and actor on a truly dreadful, misguided attempt at pro-Castro propaganda called Cuban Rebel Girls (1959). It was Errol Flynn’s last movie — a weird, post-meta swan song wherein Errol plays himself, trying to secure an interview with Fidel Castro, who also plays himself in the movie. Of course, Errol meets a trio of hot, busty rebel girls in the jungle. Errol wrote the script, got Castro’s cooperation, and probably drank his way up and down the island, spreading revolutionary fervor and Old Hollywood syphilis to the pool of extras before wrapping the production and dying of a heart attack two months before the film could be released.

Not that Allen Baron wasn’t any less wild during the making of Cuban Rebel Girls. He accidentally shot and wounded a man during production. He also had an affair with a woman who turned out to be the girlfriend of a Cuban gangster. He was wanted for the shooting and was on the gangster’s “to kill” list when he snuck back into the country to steal and smuggle the equipment out.

And now here it was, a new century, and his little movie that the studio did nothing to promote and let slip into the ether was back and beloved.

Send your own blast of silence out into the void. You have no idea how it will echo back to you someday. And who knows, someday you might get to work with Florence Henderson.

OZ DON’T SLEEP

Well, this time he does. I’m writing this from London, where I am jet lagged beyond belief and about to collapse. Next week I’ll be back with a ton of movie, book, music and comic recommendations. For now, there’s a few tickets left for the late show at the Minetta Lane Theater this coming Saturday, July 12th. The early show Friday and the early show Saturday, as far as I know, are gone. Head over to the Minetta Lane website and grab a ticket. See you there. Nighty-night!