MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

Dark, handsome Claude (Vince Edwards) is a driven young man with a fairly middle-class dream--he wants to build a house on the Ohio River. But he figures he'll never make enough money at his current job so he branches out, becoming a killer for hire. A man named Brinks puts him in touch with a man named Moon who keeps him waiting for a while as a test of Claude's determination, but soon Moon gives him assignments and he is a success, killing one man by posing as a barber and slicing his throat, killing another by posing as a doctor and cutting off a patient's life support. Claude is calm and cool, and theorizes that he'll never get caught because, as a hired gun (though he doesn't like to use guns), he doesn't know any of his victims and, assuming the job is done cleanly, he can't be tied to any of them. Eventually Brinks calls him to kill Moon, which he does. Then he has to go to Los Angeles for a more high-profile hit: kill Brinks' former mistress who is about to testify against him in a court case. In L.A., he is met by a pair of keepers, Marc and George. Though the three hit if off, Marc and George are kept on their toes when Claude insists on taking it easy, having them chaperone him around town before he gets down to business. Billie, the mistress, is a jazz pianist who has essentially barricaded herself in her suburban home with plenty of police protection. Reluctantly, Claude turns to a plan using guns. He fudges it the first time and, with only a day left before Billie's court date, Marc and George are told to get rid of Claude. But Claude has a different idea. 

This is a taut, straightforward thriller with hints of film noir in its tone (an antihero at the center of the narrative) and look (a low-budget unfussiness about sets and camera style). The first half of the movie is paced briskly with its no-nonsense relating of the plot; though Edwards is on screen for almost the entire film, we never get to know him or learn what makes him tick. But once the story moves to Los Angeles, the pace slackens, just as Claude shifts into what seems to be vacation mode. The tone has been dead serious until now, but Marc (Phillip Pine) and George (Herschel Barnardi) supply some comic relief with their befuddlement over Claude and his leisurely approach toward accomplishing his hit. Edwards is exactly right in his role. Despite his surface calm, we can sense an intensity that bubbles up now and then. As I noted above, Claude remains a psychological blank, though we figure out that he is something of a woman-hater; he’s not happy to learn that his target, Billie, is a woman, saying that women are "not dependable," hence harder to get at. A later scene involving a hooker might lead us to a reading of Claude as closeted homosexual, but that remains only a hint. Pine and Bernardi are fun but are also good at being serious when they have to. A woman named Caprice Toirel is very good as Billie, but surprisingly, she never made another movie. The last half-hour drags just a bit as Claude's plans go awry, but otherwise I recommend this highly. Edwards' career changed gear a couple of years later when he played a doctor on the hit TV show Ben Casey, and when Claude strolls the halls of the hospital in his disguise, I had to laugh because he looks exactly like Ben Casey. [TCM]