Blast of Silence - The Impossible Holiday Noir

Christmas and noir, the perfect contradiction.

We’ve all seen it. Maybe you’ve even been unlucky enough to have lived it. The tale is as old as time: a bad holiday business trip. Planes, Trains and Automobiles may have made a comedy out of the trope, but not even Steve Martin can completely erase the pressures of the holiday season. It’s a time of cruel juxtaposition. Fighting for warmth in the coldest months of the year. Shelling out cash you don’t have for gifts. Stressing over finding time to relax with the family. For being the happiest time of the year, the holiday’s are as much a reminder of the cold fatalism that can break an isolated practitioner. The world feels much more lonely when connection, family, and warmth are marketed on every snowy street corner. 

Frankie Bono, a hit-man looking for love, finds himself at the center of this contradiction in Blast of Silence, a 1960 drama that somehow blends the contrasting holiday and noir genres. On one side; the values of family and connection, the colorful and glowing cinematography, the relentless comedy, the unbridled innocence, the incessant hokeyness, the overt righteousness of a classic holiday flick. The other; the fatalistic themes of post-war malaise, the criticism of material culture, the grainy black and white footage, the deep shadows, the murder and apathy at the heart of film noir. Two genres could not be more dissimilar, but as they say, opposites attract. 

Cynicism laces the very film Blast of Silence was shot on. Unlike a Charlie Brown or Santa Claus, the movie hurdles straight into noir pessimism and excitement with its opening shot. A handheld camera at the front of a train, the screeching of the tracks pierce the unique second person narration. “You were born in pain,” reads the scratchy voice. A woman's shriek is heard as the end of the tunnel approaches. It’s pure, disorienting, chaos that presents the world itself as inherently cruel. From the moment you, Frankie Bono, were born, you were subject to terror. 

Now, who's ready for some gifts?

While the film is subtle enough to avoid such a tonal whiplash, it is not by much. The narration is overtly, almost comically cynical. Frankie Bono is a spiteful person so filled with hate, his life is narrated by it. While walking the New York streets, Frankie’s mental captor laments: “You hate cities, especially at Christmas.” “Your hands are sweating, but it’s alright, because you know why. It’s the hate of Harlem. They hate you and you hate them.” My personal favorite: “You hate Christmas so much, you can’t stand the thought of sweating it out alone in a crummy motel room.” The word “hate” appears twenty two more times in the script. 

Coincidentally, so does “alone,” and if Frankie Bono is anything besides cynical, it’s isolated. At this point, we begin to see how the once opposing genres of noir and holiday merge with beautiful contradiction to bring out the most purely noir experience one could hope for. Holidays are synonymous with connection and familial warmth. Countless films in the genre take place in a generous grandparent’s cozy home where one learns “the meaning of Christmas,” which is almost always some variation of appreciating relationships over materialism. The grouchy businessman learns from the low-income shopkeeper that Christmas isn’t about meetings with big suits and grand displays of wealth through luxurious consumption in a freezing Times Square. Instead, it’s about the connections made in holiday's past, the relationships held near and dear to one’s heart for warmth in the cold winter months. Taking the ultimate holiday trip gone wrong, Frankie Bono thus represents the theme of isolation pertinent to both genres. The holiday protagonist must learn the Christmas spirit of selflessness. Meanwhile, the bar is much lower for Frankie. His cynicism makes him an effective killer, but a lonely one. The narration, in typical noir fashion, is incredibly subjective, flipping between mindsets that Frankie forces himself to believe. One second, his own mind protects him from the silence. “You’re alone. But you don’t mind that; you’re a loner…by now it’s your trade mark.” The next, Bono is at his lost lover’s door,  Lori, begging for the tie they once shared. In both genres, loneliness is an ever present threat, the only difference is that in holiday noir, the Christmas spirit is left unknown, the isolation unsolved. It’s a cold Christmas for Frankie Bono as he walks the New York streets, silhouetted by shining Christmas decor, wandering through crowds of couples. The holiday’s are overtly communal, which makes the isolation so consistently present in film noir’s leads stick out that much more. 

Frankie visits Ralph, a guy who knows a guy that can get him the right tool for the job. The entirety of Blast of Silence indulges in these noir cliches. The silent killer. An overwhelmingly pessimistic narration. The doomed romance. The hitman for hire. Bono even sports a fedora instead of ear muffs despite the narration’s never ending reminders of the brutal Christmas cold. In this way, not a single aspect of the holiday season is allowed to be “merry.” Busy storefronts are indicators of post-war consumption, and the infinitely meandering Bono often takes part in is a reminder of the patterned, mindless living this capitalist practice motivates. The nostalgic, snowy New York in holiday films is a decrepit, isolating, and liminal space in the holiday noir. Once again, we see how the elements of one genre brings out the best of another: the holiday film’s consumption acts as the perfect backdrop for a noir genre defined by its contempt for its post-war, hyper consumerist moment. Merging two genres, one anti-capitalist while the other presenting stylish consumption, allows for an extra effective, definitively noir theme of anti-consumerism.

The optimistic holiday scenery and iconography is taken advantage of to highlight further noir elements. Being one of the films to develop the independent New York style, Blast of Silence’s camera remains documentarian in style, save for the expressly noir high, low, and dutch angles. This grounded camera often tracks Frankie aimlessly walking through New York shoppers, which as we’ve discussed, highlights his isolation through juxtaposition. The long cuts emphasize the liminality and displaced sense of time so crucial to noir narratives. New York is a labyrinth in the snow, one that freezes the heart of any lonely hitman. Ralph’s apartment may have been dolled up in an alternate dimension, more holiday forward, version of this film, but as it is, Christmas is only a painful reminder of the cold outside world. Captured in disorienting low angles, Ralph’s apartment is made to feel unhomely, much like other representations of noir domesticity. To critique the faux ideal life promoted in the post-war moment, film noir often critiqued the idea of domesticity through crass depictions of the supposedly comfortable suburbs. This pattern continues with Ralph’s limp Christmas tree surrounded by rats in cages. In this way, cinematography and props are used to showcase the fleeting impact of holiday joy on an inherently fatalistic world.

Two sides of the same coin, the Holiday Noir inverts holiday themes that reveal themselves to be the core traits of any celebrated noir. In Ralph’s apartment, he asks Bono if he’d like to stay for a neighborly New Year's drink. If this were Elf, Bono might oblige, and he’d most likely  be buying a thoughtful gift off of Ralph instead of, well, a gun. Instead, Bono leaves the lonely Ralph, but not without trying to short change him followed by an insult. To cap off this show of selfishness, Bono’s own narration moments before this scene point towards his endless wealth. The familiar themes of selflessness and connection are never realized. After all, Bono hates the guy, he hates everything and every one. In other words, Bono is Scrooge. He begins the film spiteful, alone, and spiteful because he’s alone. However, he refuses to acknowledge this humanity, instead shoving it down for occupational success. Now Bono sounds closer to Joe Fox. 

In many ways, film noir is the perfect inverse to Holiday films for their sheer amount of one to one contradictions, that when utilized effectively, can create the definitive experience for either genre. The genre’s differences reveal similarities, while heightening their unique traits to elevated effectiveness. A brutal murder is all the more shocking when it’s done with glowing Christmas string lights.

However, the ultimate inversion, and stamp that marks this holiday noir as leaning more towards its ladder genre, is the ending. Whereas the holiday film is required to have a happy conclusion, film noir’s are known for their fatalistic climaxes. Frankie Bono, after attempting to reconnect with past loves and get out of the game, becomes a victim of his own selfishness. Realizing isolation hurts far greater than a gunshot, Bono tries to become the holiday protagonist. However, the film ends with a perfectly Christmas-noir flair: a shootout in the snow. Bullets fly, and Bono is left fatally wounded, forever drifting in the dirty river he threw his weapon into minutes before. As stated, loneliness is never reconciled in the noir film as it is in the holiday. Instead, gifts are never exchanged, relationships are left broken, and lessons are never learned. Any noir is the opposite of a good holiday flick. That is, only if you’re trying to feel warm by the end.