Retro

Murder by Contract

Irving Lerner
USA 1958
81 min
V'08

Murder by Contract further confirms the transformation of the suburban home into a dangerous space, but one that simultaneously allows for an effective mode of female agency. It suggests the waning of the femme fatale in the Film Noir cycle at the end of the 1950s and the potentially greater agency of women in centrifugal space. A contract killer named Claude (Vince Edwards) accepts a final assignment that takes him to Los Angeles, where he is to murder a key witness named Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel), who is prepared to testify in a trial agaist an underworld leader. It is the killer who says: «I don't like women. They don't stand still. When they move, it's hard to figure out why or where for. They're not dependable. It's tough to kill somebody who's not dependable», an attitude practically identical to that of Film Noir itself. Women who move freely through the metropolis - femmes fatales - become mere ciphers for the city itself or are sublimated into material objects. Like The Killer is Loose, Murder by Contract challenges the ideal of the inviolability of the suburbian home, a space presented in the film as no longer impregnable but now overrun by energies and forces that challenge those who inhabit it. Yet the film also contests the stereotypes of the helpless female victim or the male sexual predator through its depiction of a protagonist who survives both police and criminal agression by means of her intelligence. The death of the femme fatale in Murder by Contract suggests the birth of a different female subject - and a different male subject - in the centrifugal spaces of late modernity.
Edward Dimendberg

This film is screened together with <filmlink id=\"2811\">City of Fear</filmlink>.
1959, Irving Lerner

Credits
  • Michael Granger
  • Vince Edwards
  • Phillip Pine
  • Herschel Bernardi
  • Caprice Toriel
  • Kathie Browne
  • Joseph Mell
  • Ben Simcoe
  • Lucien Ballard
  • Perry Botkin Sr.
Columbia Pictures
35 mm
bw
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