Murder by Contract (1958)

Film: Murder by Contract (1958)

Stars: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel

Director: Irving Lerner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

You'll notice at the bottom of this article that I have broken out the noir films into the 1940's, 1950's, & Neo-Noir.  This isn't to say that these are the only eras of noir.  Noir films existed, at least in some state, in the late 1930's though they were usually less reliant on the "dangerous woman, seedy underbelly, lots of plot" motif, and instead were more akin to the gangster films of the decade like Scarface or Little Caesar.  And it's not like noir totally evaporated in the 1960's...the neo-noir movement was more a thing of the 1970's but the genre didn't totally dissipate.  But by the late 1950's most of the stories had been told, as well as the big stars of the genre had either died or had aged out of it, and so it was on its last legs.  Really, when you think of noir you can kind of think of it as bookended between The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil, a 17-year run in Hollywood.  A lot of the elements of noir would not disappear as we entered the 1960's, though, but be absorbed by the French New Wave, specifically Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.  While it's obvious that Welles and other filmmakers influenced Godard & Robert Bresson in the coming years, I don't know that I've seen a movie quite like Murder by Contract, whose approach feels exactly like a French New Wave film...except in English.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like a lot of the New Wave, the plot here isn't super concentrated (the biggest departure between film noir and some of the crime films of the New Wave was that the plots became lighter).  But essentially we have Claude (Edwards), a contract killer who is saving up to buy a house.  He is hired by an unseen crime boss to start doing killings, which he does mercilessly.  He is then assigned to kill Billie Williams (Toriel), whom initially he doesn't realize is a woman (the name is a clear misdirect), which he gets angered about because killing women "costs extra."  He has a consistent moral quandary before he finally does it...and then it turns out that he actually killed a policewoman-Billie is still alive.  At this point he thinks he's jinxed, but he still has to do it, knowing that his own life is on the line if he won't go through with killing her.  In the end, Claude does get into Billie's house, but he can't go through with it, with her begging him not to kill her, and in the chase out of her house, he is gunned down by the police.

The film's approach is unusual.  It has a narrator, which isn't rare in film noir (Laura, for example, has it), but it's not common either.  Claude is unusual as a leading man because he's gruff.  There's no real effort to be made to try to flesh him out as anything but ruthless.  Even when he won't kill Billie at first, it's not a moral quandary but a fiduciary one-he thinks he's being undervalued for his work.  It's also worth noting that in this movie, while the actress playing Billie is attractive, she's decidedly not the sex object like you'd assume in a film noir: it's Claude himself.  With thick hair, bulging biceps, & a face that kind of resembles a young James Caan, Edwards is hot in this movie, and the director leans into it.  There are extended scenes at the beginning where the actor is doing pushups in a white tank top, and later in the movie he pulls up for a swim on the beach in short shorts, resembling in some ways Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.  This switchup works really well...kudos to the casting director for finding the exact right fit for this film.

The movie, though not a hit in 1958, was highly influential not just on the French New Wave, but one American director in particular.  Martin Scorsese has spoken publicly about how this was one of the biggest influences on his career, and you can definitely see that in the pacing of the film, the way that Murder by Contract combines the mundane with the shocking.  The workout scene feels most reminiscent of what Scorsese would do with Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, sexualizing this unlikely protagonist before the audience can understand if he's a "good guy" or a "bad guy."  All-in-all, this is a well-edited, surprisingly modern film that came out of Columbia's vault at the tail-end of the film noir trend.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler