Murder by Contract is a 81 minute crime film directed by Irving Lerner in 1958. The movie is austere and nihilistic -- it resembles in many ways crime pictures later made in France by Jean-Pierre Melville, movies like Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge. The film is the diagram of a movie. Borges' once said that if you had the outline of a novel, the novel itself could well be superfluous. This idea supported his notion of reviewing novels that didn't exist; the review could reasonably stand for the novel itself. A similar sentiment applies to Murder by Contract -- this is the skeleton of a movie, every effective, indeed, because without any excess flesh at all.
A handsome young man aspires to be a contract killer. He shaves and dresses neatly to meet a crime boss who, in turn, is beholding to another criminal higher in the pecking order. The young man named Claude wants to make some money fast so he can buy a house in Ohio (he says). The crime boss, who repeatedly says he is a "retired real estate broker" is skeptical, but takes Claude's number. He tells him that he might call in a day or never. It's a test as to whether Claude can be trusted to be circumspect, discrete, and patient, all qualities necessary to a hit man. Claude waits patiently, exercising by doing pull-ups, when he gets restless. The crime boss calls his boss, Brink (we never see him) and, a couple weeks later gives Claude a job. Claude kills a mobster in a barber shop apparently slitting his throat with a straight razor. (The film is very reticent about displaying any violence -- the murders all occur off-screen.) Claude doesn't own a gun or a knife; he says that he doesn't even carry his house-key. After a couple more killings, Brink, apparently, orders him to dispatch the "retired real estate broker".
Cut to Los Angeles. Two feckless low-level foot soldiers in the mob pick up Claude at the train station. Claude has been retained to kill a witness scheduled to testify against a mob boss in criminal trial in federal court. The two foot soldiers are a high-strung Italian wise-guy and a nondescript man who looks like a business man who wears horn-rimmed glass and may be notionally Jewish. They are worried about the contract killing since the witness has to be murdered before the trial. The witness, who turns out to a woman night-club singer (the gangster's moll) is under heavy police protection somewhere in the Santa Monica mountains. Claude wants to see the sights in LA. He even goes to the zoo and drives balls at a range -- he likes LA and has never been to the place before. His handlers get increasingly anxious about his delay, but he's having a good time as a tourist. Claude is upset that the target is a woman. He says that women are unpredictable and talk too much; men are easier to kill. Claude interviews a drunkard who used to work as the chanteuse's maid -- this informant, who makes a desultory pass at Claude, says that the target spends all day watching TV. (We also see the woman practicing classical music on her piano). Claude rigs up a high voltage short circuit in the woman's TV set but the hit fails -- the victim is using a remote and doesn't touch the TV. He, then, buys a hunting rifle and arranges for a grass fire to distract the cops and bring the woman to the door where he can shoot her with his high-powered rifle. He does indeed kill a woman at long range, but this is a female cop who has put on the victim's house-coat. Claude is about to leave town, confident that he has killed the victim, when he sets up a date with a call-girl and, by accident, learns that the target is still alive -- the police woman has been killed by mischance. Claude's two handlers take him to an abandoned film set for some tiny, unknown motion picture studio. Claude manages to kill both of these men before they can kill him. But a contract is a contract, and Claude decides to persist in his efforts to murder the witness even though he proclaims the hit is jinxed. He goes to the county building inspector, gets copies of the plans for the house where the target is under protection, and figures out that he can crawl up a culvert and get into the place. So he goes there, planning to strangle the woman with his neck tie. This sets up the hyper-efficient climax, involving a little gun fire, some gunsmoke drifting out of the culvert, and, then, the protagonist's limp hand emerging for a second, drooping down as a final title tells us that this is the "END" of an Orbit Production. Have you ever heard of Orbit Productions?
The movie is very skillfully written and is a riff on Nietzsche's notion of the "Superman". Indeed, the Italian wise-guy calls the contract killer "Superman." The murderer asserts that the ordinary principles of right and wrong don't apply to him. He is a cold, calculating murder-machine. (At the climax, it turns out that he's not as amorally rational as he pretends to be.) There's some understated dialogue on the theme that killing people in war gets you medals; killing people on a contract hit, gets you executed in the electric chair. The specter of mass death by nuclear war hangs over the picture and we see a machine gun for sale at a sporting goods shop for $124.99. Conventional morality has failed and all that remains is remorseless slaughter for hire. The scenes with the two foot-soldier gangsters are carefully and effectively written and the interactions between the murderous killer and women (the drunk maid and call girl) are also very well performed. The killer is played by Vince Edwards, the man who later acted the role of Dr. Ben Casey in the TV series of that name (the director of Murder by Hire also directed 13 episodes of Ben Casey and, later, worked for Scorsese as executive editor on New York, New York.) Murder by Hire is pared down to very terse, schematic scenes: it's the apotheosis of late fifties and early sixties TV style - there's no cursing, no sex, no violence; everything takes place in bright well-lit rooms. There is nary a shadow anywhere in sight and, certainly, nothing hinting at 'poetry' or symbolism. Everything is crystal clear and visible to the viewer. The dialogue has the snappy zip of a scenario by Rod Serling; it's laconic, epigrammatic, and ultra-hard-boiled. Some of the scenes remind me of the nihilistic criminals in Michael Mann's Thief or David Mamet's crime films but there is likely no influence. The film looks as if it had a budget of about ten bucks and who ever heard of Orbit Productions? -- none of the actors except for Vince Edwards were familiar to me, although I'm sure they were yeoman players who made a living with bit parts on TV. And they are all very good. Martin Scorsese has listed 51 movies that he thinks can be productively paired with his films -- you can see the list on Lettrboxed, a film web site. He recommends this movie highly and so do I. There's not a bit of surplus here -- no love interest, no subplots, not even a hint of psychology: it's all on the surface, a chart of vectors and narrative pathways leading inexorably to the film's ascetic climax.
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