Starring: Allan Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Gil Rogers, the gruffly beautiful voice of Lionel Stander

’tis the always too-soon Season preemptively being pushed… so get your jollies and head home for the Holidays with The Deuce for a bracingly “refreshing” BLAST OF SILENCE!! A grimy, Grim-Reaper crime-ride through the wintery vice-laden landscape of the Big Apple, burrowing deep into the rotten-core darkness of a hitman’s heart and lonely soul… a murky emotionally wrought milieu where Grindhouse meets Arthouse in a miasma of pain and the misery of a life full of misdeeds that makes Munch’s ‘The Scream’ seem more like a mousey squeak! Eeek! Welcome to Sad-sack City!!

Gun-for-hire Frankie Bono (and you thought there was only one) is back on the hometown turf of the tough NYC streets he grew up on for a pre-Yuletide ice-job on a Manhattanite mobster that gets trickier, stickier, and riskier with each tensiony turn and nerve-fraying fracas… a slush-fuck harrowing homecoming of an unfortunate’s failings at romance, family, opportunity, and fortune that’s got Frankie fully falling apart! Welcome to Chillsville!!

Whether bopping into a Bucket Of Blood-esque Greenwich Village beatnik jazz-bar, popping in on a sewer-rat raising gun-dealer (and irl co-creator of The Monkees!?), or darting down and around the darkest corners of NYC back-alleys, bohemes, and Outerborough fringes – all just an echo of Frankie’s lonely, pained, falling-to-pieces frailness of mind that manifests its ultime amidst the “mob’s” (irl) Jamaica Bay dead-body dumping grounds during a (also irl) raging Hurricane Donna! A roiling tempestial cacophonic cauldron where Bono’s bleak past, bleaker present, and bleakest “future” all come to a boiling breaking point of bleakdom!! Welcome to Bummerburg!!

Promised the use of the lighting and camera equipment from a gig working on Errol Flynn’s final flick, Cuban Rebel Girls – IF he could smuggle it out of said Cuba after the production was preemptively abandoned due to the percolating Revolution – writer, director, and star (in a role imagined for Peter Falk) Allen Baron poured personal experience and $20,000 into making this operatic opus that broke the mold of middling murder-movies… fashioning instead an ahead of its time thriller… film noir at it most pitch – “une Trou Noir de Jai”, if you may – blackest in its existential coming-apart… and bolstered in its brazen downbeatedness by a bravado over-dubbed narration courtesy of Baron’s (uncredited) black-listed buddies: Waldo Salt penning and Lionel Stander reading, as the voice of our unseen conductor guiding the film down its dark tunnel of spiraling despair… until finally arriving at a destination of damnation ne’er visited by the timid circa ’61 teetotalers at 42nd street’s deco-y decorous New Amsterdam Theatre… caught unawares and in for a particularly dastardly double-bill that B-picked this powerhouse of perversity with the more main-streamy “steamy” soaperatic Splendor in the Grass… Lucky for you The Deuce skipped straight to the better-y and more bizarre of the two!! Welcome to Weirdtown!