Murder by Contract

A late noir, Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract, comes out the same year as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. 1958: This is five years after Paul Schrader, in “Notes on Film Noir”, declared, , this point as the legitimate end of the genre. Much of the reason 1953 works as the end of the noir road is a diminishing of three fundamental qualities infused in classic noir:

– postwar (WW II) delusion

– romantic narration

– not trapped by the past

The last of these three, more precisely, the virtual disappearance of the past, best exemplifies Murder by Contract. Indeed, the film seems light years distant from Touch of Evil, considering how heavily the past weighs on Hank Quinlin (Welles).

Look no further than Claude (Vince Edwards), the workaday stiff who transforms himself into a contract killer. We barely get a whiff of his past. Certainly there’s an absence of a troubled past. So much so that he emphasizes his clean police record when applying for the hitman’s job. He’s presented as a solid citizen aspiring to make enough money to buy a house on the Ohio River! Evaluating his circumstances, Claude realizes it will take twenty years to get the money for the house on his $76 per week salary (I like the patriotic echo in this salary, suggesting that being a solid citizen isn’t enough). He brings little baggage to his new vocation, only the resolve to be ready to do the job effectively and efficiently.

His first contract sets the tone, not only about the mechanics of the job, but the spiritual state he enters to complete it. The approach is monk-like. The job is a business transaction, handled appropriately as a professional. However, his employer makes him wait-and-sweat for two weeks before calling him. Claude never leaves his room; he can’t miss the call. He has food brought up to the room. He exercises with a pull up bar fitting in a closet doorway.

In his Introduction to the film on DVD, Martin Scorsese mentions how Claude’s modus operandi was used to build the character of Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) in Taxi Driver (1976) (and, by inference, DeNiro’s Max Cady in Cape Fear [1994]). The methodical way that Bickle appraises and approaches life in the streets suggests a person distancing himself from the past, as well in his narration obliterating all romantic feelings about the world. Claude gives similar hints of a massive disgust for urban inhabitants, once referring to them as “pigs”. His sexual encounter, near the film’s end, has an equally business-like approach accompanied by an innate disgust for sexual contact with a woman. One might suppose Claude’s happy home in Cincinnati will include a very proper and chaste relationship with his wife.

Claude’s problem with women significantly affects his latest job, biggest job. Killing a mob informant, one who would bring down Claude’s employer. A job to save his job!

Much of the set up, when he arrives in Los Angeles, involves preparing himself mentally. He’s chaperoned by two goons, George (Herschel Bernardi) and Marc (Philip Pine), the latter increasingly frustrated by Claude’s apparently lackadaisical approach to an extremely important job. George, on the other hand, both admires and is unnerved by Claude’s approach to his work.

Finally, surveying the safe house where the witness is under heavy police protection, Claude discovers that his mark is A WOMAN, Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel). Claude recoils when he sights her. He does back to George and Marc, saying that he can’t do the job. They’re incredulous. The contract’s a fait accompli. We can infer they will all be killed if Claude doesn’t complete the mission. There’s no undoing it. Why the hell can’t Claude complete it?

Here we get another side of Claude’s view of women. In an intimate situation, they disgust him. His professional judgment – being hired to kill a woman – is different, though not unrelated to his personal feelings.

The human female is descended from the monkey, and monkeys are about the most curious animal in the world. If anything goes on, it just can’t stand it not to know about it. Same thing with a woman.

Not that he’s against killing women (but there seems a few backhand compliments here):

It’s not a matter of sex, it’s a matter of money. If I’d-a known it was a woman, I’d’ve asked double. I don’t like women. They don’t stand still. When they move, it’s hard to figure out why or wherefore. They’re not dependable. It’s tough to kill somebody who’s not dependable.

In other words, he fears them.

He wants more money for the job. Given some feeble promises, he does ahead and comes up with an imaginative plan to electrocute her through a television. The method conforms to his determination not to use a gun. Unfortunately, the woman uses a remote control instead of touching the television. It explodes but she is unhurt.

Claude feels the hit is jinxed – and her use of the remote control confirms his “not dependable” theory. Maybe even the “monkey” thesis (one of the strangest ideas to come from any character in any movie genre), in that she was curious to try the new gadget.

Time is running out, partly due to his wasting a week hitting golf balls, going to the beach, and attending baseball games. He tries again, with a rifle. It works. He shoots her when she opens the front door. Split second timing. Claude celebrates by hiring a hooker to come to his motel room. His disgust for women are re-amplified in the scene when he tells her to wipe off her lipstick. Before he dismisses her, she supplies him with inside information from the D.A.’s office.

He had shot a policewoman, not Billie, whom the authorities want the killer and the Big Boss to think she’s dead. Now he really thinks the job is jinxed. George and Marc are sent to track down Claude and kill him, except that Claude gets them first.

Again, he attempts to complete the contract. It’s a matter of pride. He gets the blueprints for the safe house property, finds a drainage culvert, and sneaks into the house. And just when Claude has beat the jink, just as he’s ready to strangle Billie, he stops. Why can’t he do it? Does he respect his victim for having eluded certain death twice before? Has he suddenly got a conscience? He crawls back into the culvert, where the police trap and shoot him.

Such is the fate of the late Fifties’ version of the “organization man”. Claude best elicits his work ethic in an early monologue:

The only type killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger. No motive. Nothing to link the victim to the executioner. Now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay. It’s business. Same as any other business. You murder the competition. Instead of price-cutting, throat-cutting. Same thing. There are a lot of people around that would like to see lots of other people die a fast death…only they can’t see to it themselves. They got conscience, religion, families. They’re afraid of punishment here or hereafter.

He adds:

I can’t be bothered with any of that nonsense, I look at it like a good business. The risk is high but so is the profit.

Making a kill is equated as completing a sale, a transaction. Hence, the word “Contract” in the film’s title. He also mentions some key words of this ethos: “It’s business”; “murder the competition” (capitalism is less about creating competition than destroying it); “price cutting”; “high risk”; and “profit”. This is a world without romance because it has wiped away the cobwebs of delusion from the past. But beware. Unpredictability stands in the way. With all his cleverness, Claude can’t evade the greatest stumbling block to this progress and dream: woman