Murder by Contract: The Same as Any Business

The film is intent on the present, an element of the fifties go-getter types and the emergence of the organization man. The stress on “man” comes during post-World War II America when he has contained woman’s aspirations to the ideal of the nuclear family, the stay-at-home Mom. The world of Murder by Contract represents a masculine ideal while revealing the stress factors inherent in the American Dream.

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A late noir, Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (1958), comes out the same year as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. This is five years after Paul Schrader had declared 1953, in “Notes on Film Noir,”1 as the legitimate end of the genre. Much of the reason 1953 works as the end of the noir road is the diminishing of three fundamental qualities infused in classic noir:

• postwar (WW II) despair
• 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 Quinlan (Welles). Why?

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 contract killer job. He’s presented as a solid citizen aspiring to make enough money to buy a house in Cincinnati! 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. He spells out his business ethic:

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 (my italics).

Making a kill is equated to completing a sale, a transaction.

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His apprenticeship is more about waiting than killing. He goes to Mr. Moon’s (Michael Granger)  apartment and asks for work. He has no experience, and Moon seems hesitant. Moon won’t even acknowledge that he’s in the market for a hitman.

Moon: I’m a retired real estate broker. I don’t do anything anymore but sit in my room, look at television, and smoke cigars.

Claude: I’d still like to work for you.

Moon: Doing what?

Claude: I want to be a contractor.

Moon: Have you done it before?

Claude: No, sir.

Moon: You can only make a mistake once in this job.

Claude: Well, I’m different.

Moon: What do you mean you’re different?

Claude: I don’t make mistakes.

Moon: Then how come you’re out of a job?

Finally, Moon tells him to wait for a call. If Claude doesn’t answer the phone, if he happens to step out and grab a six-pack or a meal, then he won’t get the job.

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His first job sets the tone, not only about the mechanics of the job but the spiritual state he enters to complete his contract. The approach is monk-like. 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. During this waiting period, a couple of elements arise that give a small but subtle feeling to the viewer about Claude. First is the offbeat music of the soundtrack, introduced during the opening credits. It’s a single instrument movement, guitar, that gives the same vibe, but without the foreign flash of the zither in The Third Man (1948). Stefen Strysky’s piece on the film’s music accomplishes two things. First, the mood established by Perry Botkin’s jazz guitar “conveys the twisted and joyful flippancy Claude brings to his work.” Second, Strysky connects the music to that played on the piano by Claude’s intended victim, Billie Williams. When Claude hears it, he starts empathizing with her and “understands Billie’s terror and therefore retains human empathy despite his work to remove such troublesome emotions.” Then Strysky asks: “Is the solitary Claude also lonely?”2

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. Like Bickle, Claude gives hints of a massive disgust for urban inhabitants, once referring to them as “pigs.” Claude’s sexual encounter, near the film’s end, has an equally businesslike 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 and most important job: killing a mob informant, one who would bring down Claude’s employer. A job to save his boss’s job! But before heading to Los Angeles, Claude must do a final bit of business. He arrives at Mr. Moon’s apartment unannounced. Moon is surprised, more so when Claude pulls a knife. Although assigned to kill Moon, Claude must have reveled in taking out the man who trusted him least to become a successful hitman.

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When he arrives in Los Angeles, much of the setup 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 the job at hand. He has fourteen days to fulfill the contract. First, however, he wants to get some time at the beach. Time passes and by the eighth day Marc, especially, is worried about Claude wasting too much time. Unfazed, he goes to a driving range, because it’s too nice a day to bother with stuff like checking out the intended victim’s house. Then he goes to the movies where Marc eats popcorn and George sleeps. Claude slips away and puts his guards in a panic. They return to the hotel trying to figure out what to do. As they are about to search for Claude, George opens the door to find Claude standing there. He stayed outside the movie theater and had followed them around town. He wanted to make sure his keepers weren’t being followed. He knows that he’s not known in Los Angeles, but what does he know about George and Marc?3 Maybe they were being followed by the police.

With four days to go, they survey the safe house where the witness, Billie Williams, is under heavy police protection. That’s when Claude views his mark and recoils. The target is a WOMAN. He assumed “Billie” was a man. She’s, in fact, the boss’s mistress. He goes 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 job. 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 intimate situations, they disgust him. His professional judgment – being hired to kill a woman – is different, though not unrelated to his personal feelings. While waiting for Mr. Moon’s call, he had a meal sent up. Claud saw that the coffee cup had faint lipstick stains and verbally assaulted the waiter who tried to make an excuse. But Claude believes a waiter should have high enough standards to prevent him from serving a customer a dirty cup. For Claude, though, it’s more than dirty. It is the remnant from a woman’s lipsticked mouth, a mouth that most likely belonged to a whore! If this isn’t enough, wait until you hear when he says to George and Marc.

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’da 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 on a level beyond their sexuality.

He wants more money for the job. Given some feeble promises, he comes up with an imaginative plan to electrocute her through a television. The method conforms to his determination not to use guns. Unfortunately, the woman, Billie (Caprice Toriel, her lone movie and television credit) uses a remote control instead of touching it. It explodes but she is unhurt. Claude feels the hit is jinxed. Her use of the remote control confirms his “not dependable” theory, if not 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 call girl to come to his motel room. His disgust for women is 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 DA’s office. He had actually shot a policewoman. The police said nothing because they wanted the killer, and the Big Boss, to think she’s dead. Now Claude really thinks the job is jinxed. George and Marc are sent to track down and kill him, except that Claude gets them first.

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

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Skepticism about business ethics, professionalism, and capitalism may have attained its forcefulness through the screen writer, Ben Maddow. His credits included Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), God’s Little Acre (1958), Men in War (1957), The Naked Jungle (1954), and The Wild One (1953). For the latter five he received no credit, having been blacklisted from 1952 to 1958 by HUAC for leftist leanings. Murder by Contract was his last uncredited screenplay, after he had apparently named a “few” names for the Committee. It makes sense that he carried his critical sensibility of American life into Murder by Contract, as he had in his past work.

The film is intent on the present, an element of the fifties go-getter types and the emergence of the organization man. The stress on “man” comes during post-World War II America when he has contained woman’s aspirations to the ideal of the nuclear family, the stay-at-home Mom. The world of Murder by Contract represents a masculine ideal while revealing the stress factors inherent in the American Dream. For example, Claude best elicits his ethic in the monologue cited above. Hence, the word “Contract” in the film title. Some key words from his ethic: “It’s business,” “murder the competition” (capitalism is less about creating competition than destroying others), “price cutting,” “high risk,” and “profit.” But beware. Unpredictability stands in the way.

With all his cleverness, Claude couldn’t evade the greatest stumbling block to his vaunted expertise and exactness: a woman. His monkish regimen suggests an inclination to keep women at a distance. His fiancée, for whom he desires to get a house in Cincinnati, may not exist, or she waits faithfully for him on the banks of the Ohio River. Nearness to women subverts his professionalism, his ability to attain the Dream.

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All images are screenshots from the film.