General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Murder by Contract

Murder by Contract is a 1958 American black-and-white film noir directed by Irving Lerner, starring Vince Edwards as Claude, a methodical contract killer who takes jobs in Los Angeles to save money for a house, and who is hired to assassinate a woman scheduled to testify before a grand jury. The film runs 80 to 81 minutes and was released by Columbia Pictures in December 1958.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Irving Lerner; produced by Leon Chooluck for Orbit Productions, Inc.¹
Screenplay	Credited to Ben Simcoe, a pseudonym; Ben Maddow contributed without credit¹^•³
Principal cast	Vince Edwards (Claude), Phillip Pine (Marc), Herschel Bernardi (George), Caprice Toriel (Billie Williams), Michael Granger (Mr. Moon)²
Production	A quickie shot in eight days on a microscopic budget; completed early February 1958²^•¹
Music	An all-guitar score composed and performed by Perry Botkin⁴^•²
Release	December 1958, Columbia Pictures; copyright registered 1 October 1958 (LP12201)¹
Later standing	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes critics' Tomatometer (13 reviews); released on DVD in 2009 in Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1⁵^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Claude is a ruthless and efficient hitman who regards killing as a trade. He explains that he wants to buy a house on the Ohio River to share with his unseen girlfriend, and that assassination at $500 a job will pay for it far faster than wage work.²^•³ After an interview with the intermediary Mr. Moon (Michael Granger) that parodies a corporate hiring process, he waits two weeks in his furnished room, exercising and following a fixed routine until the call comes.²

Claude kills only with legal weapons such as a knife, his hands, rope, or a razor; he never carries a gun and never speeds, so that in every respect but his vocation he is law-abiding. The killings themselves are never shown on screen; the film cuts to blackouts or off-screen sounds as Claude advances on his victims.²

His new assignment in Los Angeles is to eliminate Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel), a former gangster's woman set to testify against her ex-boss, while his handlers, Marc (Phillip Pine) and George (Herschel Bernardi), monitor the operation, and she is guarded day and night by separate bodyguards.⁶^•¹ Claude's distaste for women, and for this target in particular, undermines his professional calm; as coincidence and bad luck frustrate his plans, he attempts to back out, and the hunter becomes the hunted.⁶^•³

Production

The film was made cheaply and quickly. TCM's Jay Carr describes it as "a quickie shot in eight days on a microscopic budget," and the AFI Catalog records production completed in early February 1958 under Orbit Productions, Inc., with a Columbia copyright claim dated 1 October 1958.²^•¹

Blacklisted talent. Director Irving Lerner and the uncredited screenwriter Ben Maddow were blacklisted leftists, according to the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who reads the film as a black comedy about capitalism: a hitman as an independent contractor working toward a house, hired by an unseen employer.³ Lerner had begun in the New York wing of the Workers Film and Photo League and later worked for the Office of War Information; near the end of the blacklist period he managed to direct Murder by Contract and City of Fear for Columbia.⁴^•⁷

Locations. Filming took place at actual sites around Los Angeles, among them Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, the Hollywood Freeway together with the interchange downtown, the Thelma Todd House along Pacific Coast Highway, the Glendale train station, the Hall of Records in the Los Angeles Civic Center, and a Studio City driving range.¹ A climactic sequence was shot on Charlie Chaplin's old studio lot, on what remained of an exterior set used for The Great Dictator.³

Style and music

The film's most distinctive element is its score: a single guitar, composed and played by Perry Botkin, a veteran big band guitarist who had been Bing Crosby's musical director for nearly two decades. The minimalist score runs through the picture and has been compared to Anton Karas's zither music for The Third Man (1949); Variety's 1958 review praised it for its "fine atmospheric backing."⁴^•²

Lucien Ballard's high-contrast black-and-white cinematography and the lean storytelling complete the minimalist style. Critics have noted that the film owes little to the silky sheen of postwar noir; the Time Out Film Guide calls it "taut, spare, amoral," adding that "it doesn't look restricted, it looks restrained."⁴^•⁸ TCM's essay describes it as a "cusp noir," a film noir turned film blanc with a fade to white, carrying early signals of postwar societal change.²

Reception and influence

Murder by Contract attracted little attention on release and did not score a hit, but it has since been reappraised as a minor classic of the B-picture tradition.⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100% Tomatometer from 13 critics; Time Out's Tom Charity calls it "a terrific, no-nonsense B movie which comes on like something by Jean-Pierre Melville: cool, calm and dispassionate."⁵

Scorsese. Martin Scorsese has called Murder by Contract "the film that has influenced me the most," adding that he had a clip of it in Mean Streets but had to cut it because it was too long, and that the sequence in Taxi Driver (1976) in which Travis Bickle gets into shape was inspired by the film.¹ He dedicated his 1977 film New York, New York to Lerner's memory, citing the spare guitar score, Ballard's cinematography, and the lean storytelling as influences.⁸ TCM notes that Howard Shore devised a similarly guitar-flavored score for Scorsese's The Departed (2006).²

Home video. The film was released on DVD in 2009 in the boxed set Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1, alongside The Big Heat and 5 Against the House, and later in an Indicator edition of Columbia noir titles that includes a Scorsese introduction.⁴^•³^•⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1940 to 1975

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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