Stometer
Save your money for something good and enjoyable
Ketrivie
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Nicole
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
blanche-2
Martin Scorsese claims this film was an influence on his work."Murder by Contract" is a low-budget film from 1958 starring Vince Edwards. Edwards, known to us baby boomers as Ben Casey, had a particular look and quality that for a time served him well. He looked and talked like a tough guy. Here he's a guy who wants to make a lot of money and knows he can, given the right opportunity. He becomes a hit man, considering himself smart and detached enough to carry out any hit.After a few hits, his boss assigns him to a biggie in LA. There he has two underlings attached to him. He drives one of them nuts, as he seems in no hurry to learn anything at all about the assignment, content to look at the sites. Finally he says he's ready for the details.One thing no one had told him -- his hit is a woman who in a matter of days has to testify against his boss. Her house is surrounded by police, and she's guarded inside the house as well.The tough guy shows some vulnerability. He can't do it, he says. Women are too unpredictable. He says he wants more money, double in fact.Interesting crime drama. I have to say, it might have been better with another actor with more of a range in the lead. I think a smoothness and maybe a charm was called for that Edwards lacked. Just my opinion. The story is a cut above the usual routine B movies, though, and worth checking out. Also, it was shot in seven days -- given the shooting schedule, it's remarkable.
secondtake
Murder by Contract (1958)This cult-style low budget film is both fascinating and detached to the point of coldness (if not boredom), and whether you'll like or not might depend on attitude. The relentlessly cold-blooded murderous main character (played by Vince Edwards), in his late-50s handsome and sharply dressed style, is just false enough (if not exactly unconvincing) to keep the movie from taking on a life of its own in any conventional sense. We spend a lot of time watching this man get phone calls and then perform murders of various kinds (off camera, for the most part), and then zero in on the big one with a couple cronies watching. And yet he isn't especially fascinating or complex, just very hardened and determined. And so his functional presence, good looking as it might be to some viewers, isn't enough to lift up the movie.And yet the story is told in such rapid, spare, and matter-of-fact terms it's downright original. I can't think of a movie like it, though I just happened to see "Blast of Silence" which is a far better low-budget story of a gunman, and it comes from the same period (1961). What helped that later movie, and many other offbeat non-Hollywood affairs, is all the location shooting (that is, the locations themselves were fascinating), and "Murder by Contract" almost studiously avoids any sense of place, or mood and ambiance from a place (except for bright, spare, fringe of L.A. stuff, which is nice). This series of mostly rooms and interiors (some with the same oddly speckled walls and doors) creates a blankness that is both drab and defining. If this movie isn't really existential in the dramatic Orson Welles sense (or Carol Reed, or what the heck, Stanley Kubrick), the main character really is a film noir staple of a man out of place in the world and utterly utterly alone. His solution is a cold and increasingly false one--kill kill kill. For money, all toward some dream house on the Ohio River, of all places. I think the idea there is that his dream is actually modest, not some love nest in the south of France, but rather a place of honest comfort, like the farm Sterling Hayden returns to in "Asphalt Jungle." It may be no coincidence that Ben Maddow worked on the screenplay for both films.So if you can adapt to the minimalist style (and acting), and absorb the rather intelligent cinematography by Lucien Ballard (a big name for this small film), you might start to see why it has such a lasting reputation. The music is pretty terrific, a kind of 1950s electric guitar ambiance ahead of its time. In fact, much of the movie is forward thinking out of desperation to make it cohere and succeed without any money. Director Irving Lerner (famously caught spying for the Soviets during WWII though never prosecuted) has had a long career as a secondary director or editor to some of the greats in Hollywood, and some of that talent and visual acumen is shown off here, whatever the larger limitations.
st-shot
Claude like most other American is in pursuit of its dream. His day job doesn't cut it so he seeks employment as a hit man. Soon he is making great strides towards buying the house in the burbs by coldly offing a couple of mugs. When he goes out west to whack another target he hesitates because the victim is a woman. He wants more cash.Murder by Contract is an over achieving B flic with a style reminiscent of Sam Fuller and a twist or two to keep things interesting. Vince "Ben Casey" Edwards as Claude utilizes his one dimensional style to convincingly portray the dispassionate terminator who also dispenses updated Schopenhauer philosophy to all within earshot. In one inspired scene he goes into a tirade when served a dirty coffee cup. Humiliating the waiter with his withering insults, it is a scene as violent as the hits. More than once in the film director Irving Lerner diverts from the formulaic path to lend originality and ambiguity to character and scenes. The narcissistic Claude sexual orientation is questioned while an associate thug (Hershel Bernardi) questions his. He makes Billie, the female target, a drunken self absorbed shrew, thus enabling you to root for Claude.There's a lot wrong with Contract (back projection that goes light and dark, a music score more appropriate for a Greek Island) but it makes the most of what it has with a touch of originality.
jaytosh522
I had never seen this movie before last night. It was a very different and interesting movie. The movie kept me on the edge of my seat because I didn't know how it was going to unfold. The movie starts out with the main character as a sort of boring, methodical killer, then you get to see his personality and hear his story of how he got to where he is. The two thugs he hooks up with are also interesting; they are not your stereotypical hoods. Both are different and wouldn't be mistaken for hoods while they tried to get Vince Edwards to set up the "hit". There are definitely enough twists with these two also to keep things going. The only thing I didn't like was the ending, which is sort of anti-climatic after the way Vince Edwards sets up his character. However, if you enjoy a suspenseful movie, watch this one, it kept twisting around.
