“Why are you miserable? Cause you haven't got any dough? And why haven't you got any dough? Because you're too scared to go out and get it yourself. You want it to come to you. Well, nothing comes to you, Harry. Nothing except one thing... death. Death comes to you... comes to everybody. Only everybody thinks they'll live forever.” Claude (Vince Edwards), Murder By Contract
In Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contact, Claude doesn’t like women. And more specifically, he doesn’t like killing women. Since it’s his job to kill people, presumably all kinds of people, this comes as a potential moral jolt when he announces his aversion to the two mob men facilitating the murder. Claude (he has no last name) has been hired to knock off a person named Billie Williams – this person is going to testify to a grand jury against a gangster – and Claude’s taken a train all the way from New York City to Los Angeles to accomplish the hit. He’s been leisurely about it. The moment he stepped off the train (in Glendale, he’s not going to be seen at a bigger station), he’s had the two men who picked him up drive his handsome mug all over the place— he wants to see the sights. He wants to take in the Pacific Ocean. He wants to swim. He wants to go deep-sea fishing. He also wants to think. And he wants to make sure there’s no funny business going on. By the time he’s ready to accomplish his task, we’re nearly a half an hour into the picture and Claude has tested the men’s patience so much that they can’t figure him out. One likes him, he likes listening to him talk; he even dries his back after Claude swims (he seems a little in love with him, in fact). The other more cantankerous fellow who mockingly calls him “Superman” thinks he’s a pain in the ass and even weirder than the average contract killer. But they wait until he’s well rested and ready and then finally, they venture up to the potential dead person’s house. Claude spies a woman walking in the living room. Is that his wife, he asks? That’s the target, the two men say. Claude panics. A woman? No one told him it was a woman. This is the part of the movie where you think Claude has a moral code when it comes to the opposite sex. It’s not as simple as all that.
Nothing is simple in Lerner’s lean, low budget 1958 masterpiece (shot in eight days), a noir of sorts, but something more cool (as in crisply composed) and modern that it’s hard to classify simply as noir. And it doesn’t need to be classified. More in common with films that followed it – the assassin as monk of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, the assassin as organized list maker, working out to keep himself murderously awake in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (no surprise Scorsese reveres this movie and worked with Lerner) and the deadpan style of Jim Jarmusch – Murder By Contract is entirely its own dissolute creature. A movie of sunny wide open spaces in which rot and existential dread cling to the jaunty, jaundiced characters like the smog we don’t see (it’s too bright), the light and L.A. neighborhoods (shot by Ace Lucien Ballard, scored with a spare guitar by Perry Botkin recalling The Third Man) underscores that it is a movie of the late 1950s, when stability and a nice house were a yearned for and achievable American dream, but a questioned dream like so many other things in a consumer-driven society. You may end up, metaphorically speaking, like Claude’s target, the night club singer Billie (Caprice Torie) – depressed, stuck inside under guarded watch with the television blaring all day, eating your delivered soup and sandwiches, slamming the keys to your piano in anguish as you play a lovely classical piece only you care about. This is no “femme fatale,” this is a woman sitting in a prison, smoking all day with literal killers (and now Claude) lurking all around her. By the end of the film, as scared and as tough as she is, part of her seems like she doesn’t even give a shit anymore.
Lerner, with a background in ethnographic filmmaking (one early 1940’s documentary stars Pete Seeger and features Woody Guthrie, among others) connected killing with business, a common trope in this kind of movie, but he (and screenwriter Ben Simcoe) took it one step further with the killer (played brilliantly by Vince Edwards, also in Lerner’s fatalistic City of Fear), wanting to make a fast buck so he can get to the unglamorous business of buying a house and settling down. He’s new to the game, no spotty past to speak of. He’s never been to prison, he doesn’t even carry a gun, he just wants to make large sums of money to fast track a more leisurely life. That he has to unleash a cold-hearted psychopath makes no difference to him. Business:
“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 who would like to see other people die a fast death or they can’t see to it themselves. They got conscience. Religion. Families. They’re afraid of punishment here, or hereafter. Me. Ha. 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. I wasn’t born this way. I trained myself. I eliminate personal feeling…. I feel hot. I feel cold. I get sleepy and I get hungry.”
Claude’s focus and methodical approach (Lerner and Ballard frame this beautifully) is partly what does him in. Women are hard to kill. They blur his focus. He spits: “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.” It’s an amusing speech, both sexist and weirdly, not sexist at all. Women may not be dependable to him but, without really knowing it, he’s describing women as complex, curious.
The movie showcases this with Billie and two other women – a sad, sloppy drunk painting the apartment she’s afraid of kicking out of and a call girl whose endured who knows what in her line of work. Both drunk and call girl inadvertently help Claude, and Billie, in the end, tells him to leave, she won’t nark him out. These women are hanging by their fingernails to live in a world that is crushing them down and breaking their spirit. And they are outsiders, like Claude, who, in a bracing scene with a male hotel room service attendant, surely remembers what it means to be a wage slave. That Lerner gives all of these women enough time in their brief moments to reveal their shattered selves inside their outward, supposedly, untrustworthy exteriors, gives Murder By Contract a depth that seeps into Claude, who, by the end, simply can’t kill Billie.
Does he have a crisis of conscience? And, if so, why does he suddenly feel something? He appears almost sickened when pulling off his tie and fixing to strangle Billie, poisoned by a heart. Perhaps he’s spent so much time trying to kill her (in other unsuccessful attempts) that while watching her sad, trapped life, he now feels a connection to her that’s both empathetic and terrifying. The American Dream is now kaput. The guy who just wanted a damn house winds up dead under Billie’s nice home, trapped like a rat. Claude says earlier, “The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger.” Billie is no longer a stranger. In Murder By Contract that revelation is now scary, tragic and strangely beautiful.
*My piece originally published in Ed Brubaker's Kill or Be Killed