Criterion's Blast of Silence.

David Pratt-Robson in the Auteurs' Notebook: "By the time of Blast of Silence, Walter Benjamin, if not Edgar Allan Poe himself, had long ago laid the connection between detective fiction and flâneurs, and a new type of consciousness (emblematized specially by the modern phenomenon of movie-going), in which the crux of identity lies in nothing innate and little lasting, but in the act of perceiving, and, perceiving, in particular, the city: detective's work. Yet neorealism would seem to be a necessary condition for flâneur movies, which, despite Night and the City's influence, may be why relatively few major noirs followed in Benjamin's tradition, devoted entirely to cutting through swaths of city spaces and social milieus, to exploring parties and restaurants and businesses around town in an ostensible search for clues, and to depicting a man as he finds or loses himself - perhaps the same thing - in urban phantasmagoria.... But, if long post-Poe, Allen Baron's Blast of Silence still did it all years ago."

Updated through 4/21.

"The studiously gray, unglamorous views of 1961 Manhattan - St Marks Place, where Frankie takes a room at the Valencia Hotel; the blanked-out East 30s, where Frankie's mark has a girlfriend stashed in a walk-up apartment - are worth the price of admission alone," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Here's what was being left out of those Madison Avenue melodramas and Park Avenue romances of the period."

"The film plays like an unholy marriage between the realist films noir of the 40s like The Naked City and the early independent dramas of John Cassavetes, with a narrator (uncredited Lional Stander) speaking in second person like the twisted inner voice of a soul that has been basting in antipathy and spite for years," writes Sean Axmaker for MSN Movies. "The hard-boiled riffs play like pulp beat poetry distilled into pure misanthropic cynicism."

"Blast of Silence is possibly the great lost masterpiece of film noir; a twilit, deathward emanation of everything that had underlain the form from its beginnings," wrote Tom Sutpen in Bright Lights Film Journal in 2005. "No American film before it, made in Hollywood or anywhere else, had trafficked so promiscuously in unadulterated nihilism, or so used the condition of Hate - constant, irritated Hate, with no coherent Other to direct it toward - as its emotional motif."

As for Criterion's edition, Gary W Tooze at DVD Beaver assures us that "this is the best digital image of the film to date... and possibly ever."

"Beyond the packaging bonuses, there are four features on the DVD itself," notes Jamie S Rich at DVD Talk. "The final extra is a brand-new, hour-long documentary called Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence. It's both a biography of the film and of Allen Baron, of his love affair with the city he grew up in, how he got into cinema, and how he made this impressive debut. Culled from an older German TV program, it's built around Baron taking us on a walking tour of Manhattan, telling us a ton of great stories of the time when Blast of Silence was made. The revelation that he had been a cartoonist makes the comic book stuff even more apropos."

Update, 4/16: Glenn Kenny looks back on the days when...

... the home video revolution was occurring, and creating a new underground network of film collectors. These were guys (always guys) who would pore over the television listings of local stations within a hundred mile radius - or whatever they were comfortable with, sometimes more - and when they came across a picture they absolutely had to have, they'd lug their big, bulky VCR into their car, drive out to a motel, check in, hook the deck to the motel's television, and tape the film. It was via this method that I acquired my very first copy of Blast of Silence back around 1986. A Betamax copy, of course, because Betamax was the format of serious people.

Updates, 4/17: Eric Henderson in Slant: "The neglected standing of Blast of Silence is the film's own best proof of its uniquely wallflowerish take on film noir tropes."

For Newsarama, Zach Smith talks with Sean Phillips, whose "art can be found all over" Criterion's package. Volume 1 of his series Criminal features illustrations of an essay on Blast by Patton Oswalt, posted on the comedian's MySpace blog (click his name to see it).

Update, 4/18: "You know you're a part of something when it feels like both the last 'real' noir, a kiss of death to that movement as we knew it, while also one of the first true neo-realist American independents," writes Craig Phillips at the Guru.

Update, 4/21: "You know the movie's not perfect. The plot gets a little convenient, and if he can't see the ending coming you figure Baby Boy Frankie Bono may not be the sharpest cannon in the shed," writes Vince Keenan. "But you're not watching this one for the story. No. You're watching it for the mood."

Posted by dwhudson at April 15, 2008 6:11 AM