Film "Murder by contract"
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Murder by Contract
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(Murder by Contract,, Irving Lerner, 1958)
Int.: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi. USA. DCP. VOSE*. B/W. 81'
Claude is a ruthless and efficient hitman until he discovers that his next target is a woman…
“Nothing is simple in Lerner's masterpiece (shot in eight days), low budget, a kind of noir, but something fresher and more modern that is difficult to classify simply as noir. And it doesn't need to be classified. More in common with the films that followed - the killer as a monk in Jean-Pierre Melville's The Silence of a Man, the killer as a creator of organized lists, exercising to stay awake as in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (it is not surprising that Scorsese venerates this film and has worked with Lerner) and the deadpan style of Jim Jarmusch in Ghost Dog-. “Murder for Hire is entirely its own dissolute creature. A film of wide-open, sunny spaces in which rot and existential dread cling to the cheerful, ironic characters like the smog we don’t see (there’s too much light). The light and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and the anticipatory, evocative music underscore that this is a film from the late 1950s, when stability and a nice house were the longed-for and attainable American dream, but a dream shot through with consumption.” (Kim Morgan)