Dreaming of an Off-White Christmas: Blast of Silence

Off-White Christmas films exist when the sights and sounds of Christmas are woven into the plot, but the holiday is only peripheral to the story, a Christmas tree in the corner towering over the proceedings. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Lethal Weapon (1987) and The Silent Partner (1978) all fit the description as does Blast of Silence (1961).

In Blast of Silence, hitman Frankie Bono (Allen Baron, who also co-wrote the screenplay and directed) is contracted to knock off a secondary, but overly ambitious mob boss during the Christmas holiday. Bono’s work requires keeping a low profile, but a childhood friend recognizes him in a bar and invites Bono to a Christmas party, where he’s reunited with an old flame, Lorrie (Molly McCarthy). That’s when things start to go wrong.

He awkwardly tries to reignite his relationship with Lorrie and gets rejected. Bono buys a gun with a silencer from low-life Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), whom he eventually kills when Ralph realizes who the target is and tries to shake down Bono.

Maybe it’s just holiday disillusionment settling in from his brush with his past, but Frankie tries – unsuccessfully – to back out of the contract. Instead, he’s given a New Year’s Day deadline to get the job done.

Bono kills the target, goes to a dilapidated marshland dock to collect his money and now, because he tried to renege on the contract, has become a mob target, is killed.

Challenged by a minimal budget, Blast of Silence was shot in stark black and white on the streets of Manhattan without permits, offering a Cold War-era visual time capsule: Greenwich Village and Harlem, the Staten Island Ferry, Rockefeller Center decorated for Christmas. A seedy hotel with its sign welcoming “transients.” Independent, family-run stores selling books, hardware, shoes, records. Soda fountains. A billboard advertising Knickerbocker Beer. No corporate signage; not a McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts in sight. No boarded-up storefronts or graffiti. Vibrant while at the same time heart-breaking.

Frankie Bono takes in Rockefeller Center

The film’s interiors are raw and authentic. Cramped apartments, a narrow jazz club, Ralphie’s slovenly basement room which he shares with caged white rats, barely lit stairwells.

Baron, still around today at age 97, was an aspiring comic book artist who drew several romance comics in the late forties before moving on to acting. His screenplay, co-written with the blacklisted Waldo Salt (credited here as Mel Davenport) includes growling narration by actor Lionel Stander that serves the same purpose as comic book thought balloons, an unforgiving inner voice rattling around Bono’s head: “You were born full of hate” and “Now that you got Christmas out of your system” being two examples.

Given its noir overtones and New York City locale, Blast of Silence was a pioneer for the “grim and gritty” street dramas that came into vogue a decade later: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Serpico (1973) – both written by Waldo Salt – The French Connection (1971) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), with shots of Frankie walking the streets, often in a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers and sightseers and, in one long continuous shot, walking the length of a city block at dawn toward the camera.

Strolling Manhattan at dawn

There’s also a long scene that’s as representative of noir as any: Frankie sitting on his hotel bed preparing his gun for the hit: oiling it, spinning the bullet chamber, taping the silencer to the barrel, all against the soundtrack of a melancholy trumpet solo, reminiscent of the main theme of Chinatown (1974).

If Blast of Silence was a true holiday flick, that scene would’ve been accompanied by Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow. For an Off-White Christmas, the solo trumpet works pretty well.