d+kaz

Director: Irving Lerner. Country: USA. Year: 1958. Format: Digital.

Another Missing Link film, this one informing the steely-eyed, pretensions-to-philosophy hitman subgenre (echoing especially now with current online rumbles over the Coens’ No Country for Old Men). This film has the isolated astringency of European art-house films of the time (the score, titles, and opening scene are distinctly European for this time period, probably Italian-influenced), and completes the picture by saddling our cold-blooded hitman “hero” with a pair of comical, worrying overseers from the Syndicate (or Organization, or whatever these 1950s movies lovingly called the Nation Wide Mob). Minimal editing within a scene, Lerner sticking to single shot, high-ish angle setups give the film a stern, singular, and terse cinematic vernacular. While the staging and acting sometimes slides into the silly, the L.A. of 1958 is too fascinating, Lerner’s compositions to often good (Lucien Ballard inexplicably shooting this no-name B-film), and, like so many existentialism-influenced films that began appearing around this time, it’s got a sublimely poetic-fatalist ending that keeps the whole thing well above an unseen curiosity.