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.

Detroit cool

For a couple of hours there, it looked like we lost Lem Barney.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the NFL Hall of Fame announced Barney’s death at age 80 and published an obituary, only to follow up a few hours later admitting that the news was unconfirmed, a false report.

Lem Barney, 1971

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1945, Barney was a standout at Jackson State University during a golden age of historically black colleges and universities football programs. Drafted by the Detroit Lions in 1967, his rookie season is still considered one of the best by a defensive back — 10 interceptions and the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award. Over his 11-year career, he totaled 56 interceptions, seven defensive touchdowns, seven Pro Bowls, and three All-Pro selections before entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.

(1967 was a big year for Barney. In the off-season he was married and also served six months of active duty in the Navy).

Barney was also a spectacular kick returner. His 61-yard punt return against Cincinnati in 1970, a display of cunning and confidence, should run on an endless loop in the Football Hall of Fame. A Cincinnati punt hits the ground in front of Barney as three Bengals close in. But they can’t locate the bouncing ball and during the confusion, Barney grabs it off the ground and outraces everyone for a touchdown.

Playing in Detroit had some advantages and in 1968, Barney and teammate Mel Farr became friends with Marvin Gaye, who lived in a toney Detroit suburb. The three bonded over sports and music, playing golf and shooting hoops.

Marvin

When songwriters Obie Benson and Al Cleveland shopped their very un-Motown song about the state of America circa 1970, Gaye agreed to sing What’s Going On but only if Barney and Farr sang background vocals.

They’d been in the studio before as Gaye’s guests, but they were now behind microphones contributing to the background singing and the soul-brother speak that fades in and out of the mix: ‘Hey, brother, what’s happening?! Solid! Right on!”

At a time when there was zero crossover between sports and popular music – these were the days when Anita Bryant and Al Hirt provided the halftime entertainment at Super Bowls – Barney and Farr became athletic avatars of cool.

Yet just as Barney and Farr were hanging their gold record plaques, Gaye had another request: he wanted to try out, at age 31 and with no experience, for the Lions.

He moved his Rolls Royce out of his garage, turned it into a gym and began an impressive training regimen, running 4-5 miles per day and lifting weights, bulking up nearly 30 pounds.

The Lions organization agreed to give Gaye a tryout; after all, this was the team that once allowed George Plimpton to attend training camp and play quarterback in a preseason game. Gaye looked good, but not good enough to be invited to camp.

Gaye would have one more brush with sports when he sang the national anthem before the 1983 NBA All-Star game, a remarkably cool performance of that awkwardly phrased “song” that had women in the audience swooning.

Barney would get another chance at show biz, starring as one of The Black Six (1974) a biker exploitation flick that included five other NFL bad asses.

Marvin Gaye died on April Fool’s Day, 1984, shot to death by his father. Barney and his wife attended Gaye’s funeral. Farr passed in 2015. As of today, Lem Barney is still alive and hopefully well.

The Compleat Beatles

Rather than sit through the epic that is the 2025 version of The Beatles Anthology, I caught The Compleat Beatles (1982) on the internet recently.

There was a time when The Compleat Beatles was considered the go-to documentary about the band, with lots of archival footage and interviews with Liverpool and Hamburg insiders who knew them when, several current musicians and, the real coup, George Martin.

Once readily available on VHS, Paul McCartney saw it as unauthorized competitor to Anthology and acquired its rights, removing it from circulation (although at one time it was a staple in the VHS bargain bits in department stores). Today, it mostly exists in bootleg copies or on online video sites.

Here are a few random thoughts and observations.

Ringo’s aspiration of someday getting into hairdressing takes on a new meaning in light of Spinal Tap. “I fancied (owning) a string of ladies hairdresser salons,” he says in archival footage, then imagines a possible conversation with a matronly client: “Hello, would you like a cup of tea, ma’am?” a flashback to Nigel Tufnel talking about a future working in a chapeau shop: “Yes, what size do you wear? We don’t have that size.”

Cigarettes are the band’s constant companions. Does Anthology include footage of the boys smoking? Considering George’s fate, it wouldn’t be surprising if not.

When the Beatles play the Coliseum in Washington D.C., how does the makeshift drum riser not collapse? It’s barely secured and it shakes and rattles each time Ringo hits the skins.

George Martin speaks with some candor about “desperately” trying to keep Revolution 9 off the White Album and commenting on Paul’s “relentless professionalism,” a loaded phrase if there ever was one.

Martin also has this terrific quote: “I think that the great thing about the Beatles was that they were of their time, their timing was right. They didn’t choose it – someone chose it for them. But the timing was right, and they left their mark in history because of it.”

And possibly because he made himself available to the documentarians, the script at one point says Martin “continued to lead them into new territory.” Maybe, maybe not.

The closed caption option on my television spelled out Phil Spector as Phil Specter, which is defined as a ghost or something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence. Sounds about right.

Unless you had access to tenth-generation blurry bootleg tapes, The Compleat Beatles was the only place to view, snippets unfortunately, of the Hey Jude, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields Forever videos, among others. Trying to remember them in the early 1980s, years after they originally aired on television, was often like seeking to recall a dream.

There’s a directness to the documentary that you’ll not find in any of the Apple-approved material out today. (Speaking about Magical Mystery Tour, it describes how the aim was to film whatever happens on the bus trip, before dryly adding, “unfortunately nothing did.” We also see the band labor through a 1966 live version of If I Needed Someone that’s sluggish, off-key, George forgetting the lyrics).

Apparently originally released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Love Me Do, more than forty years later The Compleat Beatles is a concise, unbiased introduction to the Beatles story.

Fail Safe

October 15, 1962, was a Monday and I sat in the kitchen of our apartment on Main Street waiting for an astronaut. Signaled by a racket of distant police sirens, we got to the front porch in time to see a waving Wally Schirra seated on the back of a convertible.

Only days earlier, Schirra, one of the seven original NASA astronauts, orbited earth six times. Born in my hometown Hackensack, his motorcade was headed for a day of celebration and dedications in the town of Oradell, where Schirra grew up.

Wally Schirra in Hackensack

(In the Oradell native son pantheon, Schirra was number one until he was displaced by Bill Parcells. Nobody remembers that Nelson Riddle also grew up there).

Seeing Schirra ride past my house made perfect sense to eight-year-old me, further acknowledgement that Hackensack was the center of the universe.

Later that week, as my mother ironed with the television on, there was an afternoon news broadcast, strangely out of place when Truth or Consequences should have been on instead. If it didn’t interfere with Yogi Bear or Snagglepuss cartoons it didn’t concern me. Mom said we might be headed for a war with Russia, something about Cuba.

It didn’t seem like a big deal. I’d read enough children’s American history books from our public library to know that “we” always won: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II. And Cuba? My Boys’ Adventure Story background told me that Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders led the charge there up San Juan Hill. We’d won that war too.

War was something that happened in other places, at other times, to other people.

Suddenly, a shelter sign was posted on the wall of our school. Then, one Saturday while we were shopping on Main Street, there was a wailing siren unlike anything I’d heard. It was loud, it was everywhere and it didn’t feel like the good-natured noon whistle reminding that it was time for lunch. We stood under a store awning until it passed.

(Decades later, I came across several cartons marked, Property U.S. Govt Canned Drinking Water, in the basement of an old apartment house in Hackensack, no doubt a public bomb shelter at one point).

If an astronaut could ride past my house, why couldn’t a nuclear bomb be dropped here as well? Was that the fate of my center of the universe? And there was no Teddy Roosevelt to lead the charge this time.

With the warning that Soviet ships were not to come within 500 miles of America’s blockade of Cuban waters, the crisis ended abruptly on October 24 when Khrushchev ordered a Soviet fleet to turn around. Said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We were eyeball to eyeball and I think the other guy just blinked.”

Yogi Bear might have said Khrushchev was smarter than the average bear for ordering the ships back. And if the Russians hadn’t blinked, the fate of our world would have been captured in Snagglepuss’ catchphrase: “Exit, stage left.”

Cortez the Killer

Not counting greatest hits compilations, live records and archival projects, Neil Young has recorded 45 albums since 1968. Zuma – released 50 years ago this week – is still his best.

The songs on Zuma are essentially about a busted relationship (his marriage to Carrie Snodgress had ended) and unconsciously – because Young’s work often doesn’t seem premeditated – move from denial to anger to depression to acceptance.

The one song that doesn’t explicitly fit this cycle is Cortez the Killer. Young typically downplayed its lyrics when he told an audience in 1996, "One night I stayed up too late when I was goin' to high school. I ate like six hamburgers or something. I felt terrible, very bad... and in the morning I woke up and I'd written this song."

Okay, so the best thing you’ve ever written was the product of indigestion.

The song isn’t so much about Cortez and his geographic and spiritual conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire in the 16^th century as it is an idyllic vision of the Aztecs as a primitive society making love not war, laying around the beach chewing coca leaves and wearing colorful clothes, almost an idealized view of the hippie culture.  And with the coming of Cortez – Madison Avenue, Time magazine – it becomes an allegory about the death of sixties innocence.

Aztec washing day

(David Crosby’s Renaissance Fair, released by the Byrds in 1967, treads similar ground, using a medieval marketplace as a metaphor for hippiedom).

What lifts Cortez into the stratosphere are the final lyrics and the unexpected shift from the drone-eye view of the Aztec civilization to the first person, from tourist to participant: “And I know she's living there/And she loves me to this day/I still can't remember when/Or how I lost my way.”

Now it’s Young as flannel-shirted time traveler committing one of those conundrums of time-travel fiction, falling for someone of a past era and then before the butterfly effect takes hold, returning to his own era alone.

With the closing notes of the song, the time machine swoops away and splashes into a cosmic liquid light show.

Ironically, or maybe not, Cortez the Killer, and much of Zuma, was recorded in a studio near Zuma Beach, Malibu and Point Dume, the same location where the Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) – a film about time traveling astronauts displaced into the future – was shot.

Young’s guitar took on a new tone in Zuma, a sound that has since become his electric trademark, crackling at times with controlled feedback. The finished version of Cortez is a first take, a rehearsal jam with a dreamlike, psychedelic, at times ominous vibe, Young not letting on to Crazy Horse that the tape was rolling. It was a keeper, a rare example of first thought, best thought.

Wild and crazy, 1975

Last year, Young released another version of Zuma, called it Dume, replaced the last track on the original, Through My Sails (the acceptance song), added a few other songs that had nothing to do with the break-up theme, then rearranged the track order, placing Cortez first.

Of course, it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I’ll stick with the original. First version, best version.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Big Bopper and Dion’s “Winter Dance Party Tour” was a terrible idea – zigzagging across the upper Midwest in the dead of winter – made horribly worse by the plane crash in poor weather conditions that killed all three except Dion, who stayed on the tour bus. On January 31, 1959, four days before Holly’s death, 17-year-old Bob Dylan saw him perform at the Duluth Armory.

Here's a theory: As an impressionable kid, this might have been a haunting experience for Dylan and one wonders if the Rolling Thunder Revue was his belated response, an attempt to get it right this time.

In autumn 1975, Dylan rounded up Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg, put together a backing band and toured New England by bus and campers playing mostly theatres and college auditoriums. Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot joined for a few dates.

A film crew accompanied the tour, Dylan directing the musicians and some inner circle friends for an impromptu movie he envisioned. (At four hours, the mostly improvised Renaldo & Clara is for Dylan completists only).

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) rescued the best of that footage and includes interviews with Dylan, Baez and McGuinn, among others. When released, some criticized Scorsese’s use of several fictional talking heads (hence the title, A Bob Dylan Story), although none add much to the overall narrative.

Dylan seems energized playing to smaller rooms and performing new material from Blood on the Tracks and the upcoming Desire. Off-stage, he’s not the guy with the shades, amused by private jokes only he understands in Don’t Look Back (1967), the documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Here he’s more the avuncular dad on family vacation, even taking the wheel of an RV to drive to the next tour stop.

The band, made up of mostly spare parts, has a sound that sometimes verges on punk or metal, driven by the unlikely choice of Mick Ronson on lead guitar. Formerly with David Bowie, Ronson may have felt relieved to not have a lead singer simulate fellatio on his guitar during a solo.

Like other rockumentaries, the film looks to frame Rolling Thunder in a historical context, namely the upcoming bicentennial and the perceived country’s mood at the end of 1975 (“people lost their sense of conviction,” says Dylan). Scorsese shuffles several presidential clips, including one from Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech: “We have a country that in Bob Dylan’s words, is busy being born, not busy dying.”

It felt like an optimistic time, particularly for my generation, today’s detested Baby Boomers. Nixon rightfully left office, Vietnam and the military draft in the rearview mirror. We had our choice of FM rock stations, and something called Saturday Night Live debuted on NBC that October, a kind of Rolling Thunder Revue itself in presentation and values.

Rolling Thunder concerts ended with a cast rendition of This Land Is Your Land. Today, its lyrics seem more distant, and the sound of rolling thunder isn’t that of the wheels of a traveling caravan of musicians; it’s likely something a little more ominous.  

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

 

The following is part of the Secret Places and Trippy Houses blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room

“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

“They brought their cult to California because everybody does.” Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse

One night in 1969, four strangers – kindly Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges), redneck salesman Laramie (Jon Hamm), lounge singer Darlene (Cynthia Erivo) and hippie chick with attitude Emily (Dakota Johnson) – check into the El Royale, a fading Atomic Age lodge built right on the border of California and Nevada – a painted red stripe of demarcation runs down the middle of the lobby.

Including Miles (Lewis Pullman), the hotel’s only employee, none are exactly what they initially seem.

The same can be said for the curiously vacant Royale. Unbeknownst to its guests there is a hidden corridor running behind the rooms, each with a two-way mirror allowing for unseen surveillance or discreet filming.

When Laramie, in truth an FBI agent on special assignment, discovers wire taps and the two-way mirror in his room, he locates the secret passageway. Looking through the mirrors undetected by the room’s inhabitant is like viewing diorama exhibits in a living museum as the guests reveal their secrets in the “privacy” of their rooms: Flynn taking apart his room, floorboard by floorboard, while Emily has a bound and gagged girl in her room.

Jon Hamm on a dark and stormy night

Later, Miles reveals that under orders from “management” he sometimes secretly filmed visiting VIPs. (Flynn looks through one reel revealing a well-known politician in flagrante delicto, a sociopolitical conspiracy red herring that goes nowhere. Director/screenwriter Drew Goddard crams a few other circa-1969 historical events into the script; only one, Miles' Vietnam service, has any bearing on the plot).

Historical aside: While the Hotel Royale is fictional, the Cal-Neva Lodge was a resort and casino straddling the border between Nevada and California on the shores of Lake Tahoe. In 1960, Frank Sinatra purchased the resort with several others, including Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. Allegedly, John and Robert Kennedy used the lodge to carry on extra-marital affairs.

When Emily blasts one of the guests with a shotgun, it sets off a series of events – including the appearance of Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a psychotic cross between Charles Manson and Jim Morrison – that bring on the “bad times.”

Hemsworth reviews the mystery film

Goddard knows his way around secret places and trippy houses. In his The Cabin in the Woods (2011), there’s a two-way mirror and secret entrances leading to underground passageways, all central to the plot, gateways to understanding why and how things are happening. In Royale, the secret corridor is an ingenious device that provides glimpses into the characters’ behaviors and intentions, leading us to continually readjust our perceptions: “He’s good, no he’s bad, wait he’s definitely good.”

Like The Cabin in the Woods, which turns teen slasher movies upside down and inside out, Bad Times at the El Royale is another genre-bender, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians on acid, as a group of strangers assemble in a vacant hotel on a dark and stormy night and the bodies start dropping.

The film’s MVPs are Bridges, Erivo and Pullman. Flynn and Miles are well-realized characters with backstories, although Darlene is a bit one-dimensional; taken together, however, they forge a bond and the emotional core of the movie. Hemsworth’s Billy Lee is scarily evil.

MVPs Bridges and Erivo

Considered a box office flop when it was released, Bad Times at the El Royale is a clever, suspenseful movie that manages to keep its bursting-at-the seams plot and characterization together. It's worthy of a second, or if you’ve yet to check it out, an initial look. 

And be careful standing in front of hotel mirrors. You never know who might be behind them.