This article dives into the captivating world of 'Murder by Contract,' a 1958 neo-noir thriller that quietly influenced cinematic giants like Martin Scorsese. From its minimalist style to its existential themes, the film's impact on modern cinema is explored.
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the studio system tightly controlled all means of production and distribution, it was easy for films to vanish from cultural memory both figuratively and literally. Damaged and unprotected film reels resulted in a colony of lost films from this era. With the advent of B-movies, less regarded films attached alongside A-pictures, the hard work accomplished by various cast and crew members was slowly fading away.
Thanks to champions of the art form like Martin Scorsese, who established the non-profit, The Film Foundation, to preserve and restore classic cinema, more films from decades and centuries past have the chance to reach contemporary audiences. Even without his charitable work, Scorsese's outspoken cinephilia has raised the profile of countless films, including Murder by Contract, a mean, lean, and utterly gripping noir that left a profound impact on the Taxi Driver director. 'Murder by Contract' Is a Tight Noir About a Methodical, Existential Assassin In the 1950s, film noirs were all the rage in Hollywood. The genre, often following a hard-boiled detective investigating an ominous, constantly-shifting plot under the guise of a duplicitous femme fatale, spoke to post-WWII malaise and hushed distrust of the government. They tapped into the underbelly of society, making them the ideal platform to popularize the anti-hero archetype long before prestige television made these morally gray protagonists a household name. While the noirs by Billy Wilder and John Huston received most of the mass acclaim, there were plenty of B-pictures that exercised the same muscles on a tighter budget and intimate scope, such as Murder by Contract. Directed by Irving Lerner, the 1958 crime thriller follows a methodical and uber-professional contract killer, Claude (Vince Edwards), hired by two associates of a crime boss. Claude's unsentimental approach to his work is tested when he learns that his next target is a woman, Billie (Caprice Toriel), who is set to testify against the crime boss. What if Robert Bresson directed a hitman movie in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï or David Fincher's The Killer? That's the best and most complimentary shorthand description of Murder by Contract. The film captures Bresson's minimalist and streamlined style and the procedural coolness of future contract killer stories. Similar to Dashiell Hammett's character construction, we know very little about Claude's interiority. We only understand him through his actions, which define his life and career, from his exercise regimes to exploring the adjacent environment of his targets. At 81 minutes, Murder by Contract is an exceptional demonstration of spare style. Akin to Tom Cruise's deeply reflective but ruthless assassin in Michael Mann's Collateral, Claude interprets the world through an existential lens. He exhibits a disaffected worldview, but his unflinching and calculated approach to planning and executing assassinations attempts to suppress these anxieties on his part. Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' Pays Homage to 'Murder by Contract' Close Without a major star or director attached, Murder by Contract could've faded away from public consciousness. However, the film resonated with Martin Scorsese, who praised Irving Lerner's noir as 'The film that has influenced me most.' The director was drawn to the film when making his breakthrough movie, Mean Streets, described in an interview included in Scorsese on Scorsese, stating,'It gave us an inside look into the mind of a man who kills for a living, and it was pretty frightening,' recalling his first time watching it. Scorsese initially wanted to insert a clip of Murder by Contract in Mean Streets, specifically when Claude describes the variations between types of bullets, but he had to settle for an homage in Taxi Driver, when Scorsese himself plays a man in Travis Bickle's (Robert De Niro) cab, morbidly outlining the impact that a magnum gun will have on his intended target. Scenes depicting Travis working out and fine-tuning his physical appearance are highly evocative of Lerner's film as well. Beyond Scorsese's fondness for this underrated noir thriller, the DNA of Murder by Contract can be identified in a handful of modern classics coveted by budding cinephiles beginning to appreciate film as an art form. The unofficial genre of cinema, colloquially defined as'film bro,' about lonely, alienated men who resort to masculine posturing, such as American Psycho and Drive, can be traced back to Murder by Contract. One could interpret Vince Edward's anti-hero, who is used as a thankless vessel for a crime boss, as a primal symbol of'we live in a society,' a concept about cultural angst adopted by Taxi Driver, Fight Club, and Joke
CINEMA NOIR FILM HISTORY MARTIN SCORSESE TAXI DRIVER MURDER BY CONTRACT AMERICAN PSYCHO DRIVE
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