Murder by Contract

Murder by Contract (1958) is a lean crime noir you can watch online on iFILM, all of it over in 81 minutes. Claude is cold, methodical, and treats killing for hire like any other trade: no anger, no regret, just arithmetic. Vince Edwards plays him with an unnerving calm.

Then a job breaks the pattern. The target is a woman, holed up in a house under heavy police guard. Claude, who plans everything down to the detail, suddenly stalls; the assignment slips outside his tidy logic, and the composure starts to crack. Director Irving Lerner shot the picture on almost no budget, leaning on bare rooms and long silences, and that very thrift is what makes it eerie. The score is a single guitar. There are barely any chases or shootouts, only a portrait of a man reduced to a function.

For years it sat forgotten as a cheap programmer, until cinephiles dug it back up; Martin Scorsese has repeatedly cited it as an influence on his early work. If you like early noir stripped of gloss and swagger, this one delivers. Stream Murder by Contract (1958) online on iFILM.