Gasser

Hollywood has put buzzers under theater seats, piped odors into the theater and sent ghosts jumping from the screen to sail over the audience's heads into the balcony. All that ingenuity cannot compare with the gimmick in Hard Contract. It is gas, cleverly concealed inside the dialogue by Writer-Director S. Lee Pogostin. For example: "God hardly ever comes to Madrid any more; he left with Picasso," and "Evil is a giant; good is when evil takes a rest."

Hard Contract's protagonist is a toothy, vicious gunman-for-hire named Cunningham (James Coburn). In the employ of an anonymous corporation whose business is murder, Cunningham jets off for Europe with a "hard contract" to eliminate three top men who were themselves organization assassins. He manages well enough until he meets an attractive divorcee called Sheila (Lee Remick). Before anyone can say Philosophy in the Bedroom, Cunningham and Sheila are under the same bedspread, where they spend most of their time discussing doom, guilt, predestination, war, violence, murder and the population explosion.

All this makes it difficult for Cunningham to rub out his last man (Sterling Hayden), who lives on a farm and has a disconcerting habit of holding seminars on ethics in his wheat field. Audiences will be kept in stupefying suspense wondering whether Coburn will ever get around to killing Hayden, but by the time just about everybody rides into the sunset on a gypsy wedding wagon, who could care?

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