Blast of Silence
Starring: Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker
Director: Allen Baron
The film: Some of the most critically acclaimed, innovative and influential films ever made have been self-financed, low-budget debuts like Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) Agnes Varda's La Pointe-Courte (1954) and, more recently, Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992). Such films are often years in the planning while funds are gathered, and consequently they are fully thought through and fine-tuned well in advance of actual production. Creativity and originality, too, are often born of limited financial resources.
A rare American example of this was Allen Baron's Blast of Silence (1961), which is now hailed by many critics as the last American film noir and is a landmark work in the country's early independent film movement.
Baron (right), once briefly touted as a new Orson Welles by the media, directed, wrote and played the leading role in this edgy, dark and existential film about a hit man wandering the streets of New York City as he sizes up his prey and makes the final arrangements for the kill. A constant presence throughout the protagonist's rain-soaked pavement pounding is a gravelly, second-person narration that Baron wisely inserted as an afterthought, taking advantage of the cut-price services of two of the many Hollywood names that had been blacklisted and rendered unemployable by the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts.