In this cult neo-noir, frantic hitman Frankie Bono (played by director Allen Baron) returns to his hometown of New York City over the week of Christmas to attempt a hit on a mid-level mob boss.  

Written and directed by Allen Baron, who also stars in the lead role of Frankie, Blast of Silence has become a defining mainstay of its genre. A sweaty, existential film filled with dread, it never turns down a chance to make the worst out of its main character’s actions as Frankie comes close to reconnecting with a better life during NYC’s holiday season. Yet every chance Frankie has to be a better person is steered around handily as Baron fills the screen with some of the genre’s most iconic imagery. Narrated by an uncredited Lionel Stander, Blast of Silence is slight in runtime but heavy in impact and wallows in some of neo-noir’s most hopeless story beats. 

Discussing the film’s lasting reputation and cult following in his essay for the Criterion Collection, Terrence Rafferty notes that “over the years, Blast of Silence has, like a particularly scary local hoodlum, acquired a small reputation. Martin Scorsese, who was studying film at NYU when the picture came out, regularly cites it as a key New York movie, and periodically it gets “rediscovered” and dragged out of the shadows into the glare of the international film festival circuit: it impressed the cineastes in attendance at the Munich film festival in 1990 and was screened at Cannes in 2006.