For a no-budget film shot on the sly in New York City with a nonactor in the lead role, there is a grand, existential audacity to Blast of Silence. A particularly dour film noir made a few years too late, it opens with birth and ends with death, turning its threadbare story about a Midwestern hitman going about his business in New York into a uniquely compelling treatise on the meaninglessness of it all. Of course, that is right up noir’s alley, and writer/director/star Allen Baron—a former comic book artist turned filmmaker—captures it and distills it to the essentials. On the one hand, Blast of Silence is simplicity personified. On the other, it’s its own kind of perfection. (DVD)