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The hitman's march, from the train tunnel's birth canal to the wintry harbor's primordial slime. The shabby assassin for hire (Allen Baron) born with "hate and anger built-in," a Christmastime assignment in Manhattan to elucidate the lesson that "a killer who doesn't kill gets killed." Just an empty trenchcoat floating through the city, the connection is a rotund beardo (Larry Tucker) with caged rats and silencers for sale, the target is a suburban syndicate boss (Peter H. Clune) who brings his mistress a panda plush doll. This shoestring noir has the authentic seediness and soul-sickness of a crumpled Weegee snapshot, with documentary glimpses of Harlem streets next to a storefront Santa's lifeless ho-ho-hoing and the drum-smacking and smoke of a squalid nightclub. Paddy Chayefsky, Kubrick's Killer's Kiss and Lerner's Murder by Contract, Melville... If rejection from the old friend's sister (Molly McCarthy) doesn't complete the protagonist's desperation, then the Lionel Stander voiceover scratching in his ears certainly does: "You don't have to know a man to live with him, but you need to know him like a brother to kill him." Or: "He thinks he looks like a gentleman if his shoes are shinned. You could kill him right now with pleasure." Baron's haunted New York finds its completion in Taxi Driver—a figure of Fate in his own mind, the hood is really a lonesome speck trying to look bigger by slowly ambling toward the stationary camera. "Cold hands again. There'll be a gun in them soon." You'd have to wait for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for a more pitiless autopsy of the gangland macho ethos. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |