Coffee and Noir: MURDER BY CONTRACT

every instance of coffee in noir: 041

You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?

I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.

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Murder by Contract (1958) follows a hitman whose ‘jinx’ of a contract requires him to kill Billie (Caprice Toriel, in her only film role) before she can testify in a high-profile trial.

The film is a damning indictment of the American war machine (just out of Korea and entering its deadliest era of Vietnam), but it’s also well shot, wickedly funny in places, and contrasts long monologue setpieces with sparsely worded scenes such as this one, where Billie refuses to let her morning ritual be ruined.

Coffee, reading the newspaper, and a cigarette: it doesn’t get much more important than that.

I, too, would give my bodyguard-cum-housemaid the evil eye if he thought he could vacuum through my morning sacred routine.

And what an evil eye she gives!