Blast of Silence writer/director/star Allen Baron was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927.

As a child, Baron made pocket money by announcing incoming calls to the corner candy store payphone for his neighbors on New Lots Avenue.

Prior to becoming involved in film and television, Baron was a comic book and magazine illustrator.

Baron supplemented his artist's income by working as a New York cabbie.

Baron played a small role in Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), the last film of Hollywood legend Errol Flynn.

As a start-up filmmaker, Baron often met friends and contacts at Downey's Bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

Among the Off Broadway actors who gathered at Downey's was Peter Falk, whom Baron offered the lead role in Blast of Silence.

At Downey's, Baron also made the acquaintance of Alfred Crown, a film and theatre impresario who financed Blast of Silence with partner Dan Enright and later produced Frank Perry's Last Summer (1969) and Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971).

Playing Ralph the arms dealer in Blast of Silence is Larry Tucker. Tucker later appeared as the gum-chewing lunatic Pagliacci of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) and cowrote such films as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969).

Blast of Silence leading lady Molly McCarthy had appeared previously as Steve McQueen's girlfriend in The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959) and had later roles in the cult favorite Over the Edge (1979) and in The Flamingo Kid (1984). She is the mother of WFMU disc jockey Michael Shelley.

Seen briefly in Blast of Silence as Lorrie's boyfriend is Don Saroyan, who had worked with Allen Baron on Cuban Rebel Girls and was at the time married to Carol Burnett.

by Richard Harland Smith

Source:
Just One More Thing: Stories from My Life by Peter Falk
"Requiem for a Killer: The Making of Blast of Silence", Blast of Silence DVD