Whether depicted as a cold-hearted agent of death or a low-level henchman executing his boss's grand designs, the character of the hitman is one of cinema's great fascinations. But why? Amoral, often emotionless, and without the empathy that binds people – and movie characters – together, the hitman, lacking even the ghoulishly riveting psychopathology of the serial killer, would seem to be an especially grim formulation of the modern man. Unlike cinema's many other killers, who murder for love, a cause or, most disturbingly, for fun, the hitman kills for a baser reason: money. When the father of his high-school sweetheart asks John Cusack what his line of work is in the hitman comedy Grosse Point Blank, Cusack answers, without much pride, "Hired killer." Replies the dad, "Good for you it's a growth industry."
The hired killer's lack of affect, his almost existential displacement from mainstream society, however, is what finally makes the character so intriguing and full of cinematic possibilities. When the steely cool of the hitman is entangled with the messiness and emotional complications of everyday life, a stark drama is created.
The hitman, of course, is the modern version of the assassin, but there are differences between the two. The word "assassin" comes from the name of a militant Muslim sect, the "Hashashshin," found in the Middle East from the eighth to the 14th centuries. The sect, many believed, used soldiers drugged by opium and hashish to kill opposing rulers. As these scenarios would suggest, the earliest conception of the assassin was someone who killed for political and ideological reasons — to advance the goals of a nation state. Assassins were notorious during the politics of the Renaissance era – Henry III and IV of France were both killed in assassinations – as well as in Renaissance drama, appearing as major characters in Jacobean tragedies. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "assassination" first appeared in literature in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
But while the hired killer dates back hundreds of years, our contemporary dramatic conception of the hitman is indebted to the two defining "isms" of the modern era: capitalism and Freudianism. Post Freud, the hitman's cool exterior was often seen as a mask hiding a turbulent subconscious. More importantly, in most hitman movies, the contemporary hitman can be seen as the product of the Industrial Revolution and its division of labor. The art of killing became then just another specialization, a job requiring a skilled worker integrated into a larger workforce. This business-like attitude is reflected in the names given the hitman ("contract killer") and his crime ("a job"). The hitman, with his orderly handling of murder, nicely illustrates the theories of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who believed that crime fulfilled specific functions in smoothly operating industrial societies, and that by personifying what is "wrong" criminals defined for the rest of a population the limits of the normal.
The cool élan of the contemporary contract killer was a relatively late cinematic invention. Alan Ladd appeared as one of film's first contract killers in Alan Tuttle's 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire, but working under the Hays Code, which forbid glamorous depictions of killing and killers, Ladd's hitman, Raven, is a violent, traumatized psycho who, after being double-crossed by his employer, goes on revenge-fueled killing spree accompanied by a nightclub magician played by Veronica Lake. Beating up a hotel maid, shooting a woman, and being creepily kind to children and small animals, Ladd's Raven wasn't intended as a hero — Ladd was actually billed fourth in the credits, and the film climaxes with Raven's death and Lake's reunion with her boyfriend. But the role captured the public imagination and made Ladd a star.
One of the greatest – and least recognized – hitman movies took the concept of the hitman as social pariah to the deepest realms of existential disgust. Alan Barron's 1961 feature Blast of Silence is a low-budget B-movie about Frank Bono, a hitman who experiences a full-on meltdown after he travels to New York City to carry out a hit during Christmas week. The conflicts in the film have less to do with the wiliness of Bono's prey and more with his increasing feelings of alienation from the surrounding, holiday-celebrating world. The film's stark location shooting and a relentless second-person voiceover underscoring every beat of Bono's internal psychodrama are clear influences on films like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone. Here is the film's opening narration:
You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap in the backside to blast out the scream. Then you knew you were alive. 8 lbs, 5 oz Baby Boy Frankie Bono. Father doing well. Later you learned to hold back the screams and let out the hate and anger in other ways.
Photo: Criterion Collection
Blast of Silence
Like Raven in This Gun for Hire, the hitman in Blast of Silence is ultimately a tragic figure whose demise occurs when he gets too close to the world of normal people. The simple dilemma of how to be human dramatized in these films would provide the template for a host of other films in which the hitman's attempts to make a human connection leads to his downfall. For Tom Cruise, the hitman anti-hero of Collateral (2004) was both a career-changeup as well as a role that calculatedly exploited our fascination of what must lie beneath the star's typically smiling demeanor. In Michael Mann's film, a taxicab becomes the stage for a two-hander in which Cruise's top-of-his-game hitman is challenged by the greater humanity of a lowly cabbie. In Robert Duvall's Assassination Tango (2002), Robert Duvall's contract killer immerses himself in the tango culture of Buenos Aires as he realizes that his professional skills are diminishing, whereas in Mark Malone's underrated Bulletproof Heart (1994), starring Anthony LaPaglia and Mimi Rogers, a hitman is thrown for a loop when his employer and his assignment turn out to be the same person - and he falls in love with her. In order to find a hitman completely immune to the seductions of the common man, we must journey into the realms of science fiction – specifically, the world of the Terminator movies (1984, 1991, 2003), in which the hitman has been recast as an unstoppable cyborg.
There's a sort of fractal logic to the hitman movie – each carries within it the characteristics of all the others. Nonetheless, there is another strand of the genre in which the principal conflicts are not found on the outside but rather within, and it is these films that we most often find the cool, capable, and morally undisturbed figure that we most associate with the modern hitman. With American studios too concerned with ensuring that audiences know that hitmen are bad, it was left to the French – and, specifically, to Jean-Pierre Melville – to create the character's most enduring cinematic archetype. In his 1967 film Le Samouraï, Alain Delon plays a fedora-and-trenchcoat-clad professional, Costello, whose job is inextricably entwined with his ascetic, removed lifestyle and his unblinking attention to precision and detail. Like many other hitman heroes, a girl — in this case, a nightclub singer — has something to do with his downfall, but for the most part his demise is precipitated by his failure to maintain his own high standards, a rigor symbolized by Melville's impeccably art-directed, almost unreal universe. Writing in Senses of Cinema, the critic Adrian Danks observes:
These types of stoic, often joyless and strangely sacred rituals are for Melville's characters a way of distancing themselves from the world, of maintaining an impossible purity or of simulating a rigorous professionalism. It is in the moment when this ritual, professionalism or purity breaks apart that the characters' demise is prefigured or marked. In Le Samouraï, for example, it is when the protagonist breaks from his routine and swerves minutely toward some kind of personal involvement, that his fate is sealed. Despite the blank amorality and explicit anti-humanism of his murderous actions it is the "purity" of his existence and work that enables his character to survive.
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