Le point de non-retour

Point Blank(1967) is a early feature by John Boorman who would go on to direct Deliverance(1972), Excalibur(1981), and The General(1998). It is an excellent noir about a man who's betrayed and left for dead who goes after the outfit that owes him money. Point Blank is a tightly constructed thriller with brillient montage and mise-en-scene. The film does a good job at showing the phychodelic colors of late 1960's San Fransico. Lee Marvin in this movie shows why he is one of the best Hollywood tough guys of all time. It is much better than the remake Payback(1999) because of Lee Marvin's presence and the masterful editing and camera work of the film.

Still packs a whallop after all of these years, this was undoubtably a big influence on all the tough-loner-on-quest-for-revenge movies to come. What's really interesting is how Marvin's unemotional and seldom speaking character is quite fascinating. Instead of him being bland, we keep studying, somehow trying to find SOMETHING behind his cold stare.

Though tough, this movie is not without a sense of humor, though it's quite subtle, such as the test drive sequence. It's good stuff, though I did have one problem; the ending is quite confusing. I am sure other viewers will not quite be able to determine what's going on.

Love it, great film.

For one thing, POINT BLANK, directed by British director John Boorman, has all the good looks of the various movements of the European New Wave, but walks the walk and talks the talk of an American thriller, and I mean that as a good thing. Boorman's brilliantly composed combination of European artfulness with film-noir elements make for an exceptionally rich and multi-layered crime thriller.

Lee Marvin, in typically emotionless fashion, is the remorseless Walker who, after pulling off a successful heist from the mob, is double-crossed, shot and left for dead in the now abandoned Alcatraz prison by his wife (Sharon Acker) and his partner-in-crime (John Vernon). Walker survives, escapes and moves to LA, where he kills his way up the ladder of a vaguely defined organized crime syndicate called "The Organization", hardly distinguishable from a legitimate cooperate business, in order to get his $93,000, occasionally aided by his sister, Chris (a great Angie Dickinson), who seems to know Walker's targets pretty well.

Philip Wisethrop's widescreen compositions are absolutely stunning. One of the most impressive scenes is when Walker is fighting two hoods in a nightclub, against a swirling psychedelic backdrop, to the strains of the R&B houseband, with its black singer hysterically shouting letting the mostly white clientèle shout with him in his microphone. But every scene is a marvel to watch, with every detail painstakingly composed without getting stiff or forced in any way. Even the car windows are almost unrealistically spotless, in order to film Walker through the glass with the reflections of the city on his face.

The film is packed with all kinds of surreal surroundings and lots of flashbacks concerning Walker's past. Boorman's games with narrative time, with extensive use of echoing flashbacks and jump-cuts, are the perfect reflection of Walker's dream-like struggle for justice, He's the typical tragic (noir)-hero, in a perpetual struggle to grasp what happened to him. He desperately tries to comprehend the situation he's in, but hasn't got a clue who's who and his outdated moral codes make him seem an even bigger anomaly in the modern corporate world he works his way into.

Whether this is all actually happening or it's all a mind-spin inside Walker's head is impossible to say. Best to enjoy the ride in this true genre classic, definitely one of the best American thrillers of the '60s. If you get the chance, watch it together with Melville's LE SAMOURAI (1967) and Seijun Suzuki's BRANDED TO KILL (1967), in many ways its French and Japanese counterparts.

Camera Obscura --- 9/10

... and maybe that's ultimately why it failed at the box office in 1967. People generally got only one shot at the apple as far as viewing went before years passed and it got on TV. Now that you have continuous access to a film, whether via streaming or DVD, you can do back to back viewings and catch everything.

1967 was a good year for Lee Marvin at MGM, where he made two movies for the studio that have ended up in the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, this one and The Dirty Dozen. John Boorman does some stylistically interesting things, but it's a bit too much, the flourishes calling too much attention to themselves and distracting from the story. He had become much more masterful at letting the visuals contribute to the advance of the story by the time he made Deliverance and Excalibur, IMO. These flashbacks Marvin/Walker kept having to events that had previously occurred in the movie - and in a movie that clocks in at under 95 minutes, at that - just seemed like overkill to me.

I found the plot terribly confusing the first time around. The crooks were hiding out in Alcatraz, where regular tours are conducted? Heck, Marvin himself is shown on such a tour very early in the film. I had no concept of what Marvin's life was supposed to have been before the events of the movie. In the flashback where he met his wife, he appears to be a dockworker straight out of On the Waterfront. The bit where the future marrieds circle each other, locked in eye contact was kinda sexy, but the presence of all of Marvin's coworkers standing one inch away from them was weird. I also didn't understand the connection between Walker and Reese or what this incredibly crowded party was where they reunited or the other barroom scene where Reese knocks Walker to the floor and climbs on top of him to tell him how badly he needs money. These scenes didn't make sense to me at all, but they didn't ruin my overall enjoyment of the movie.

I liked Carol O'Connor as the Nicest Guy in the Mob. Keenan Wynn's character I didn't get. He somehow finds Walker when no one else knows he's alive and recruits him in pursuing mutual interests. I thought for the whole movie until the final scene that he was some kind of law enforcement - a Fed, maybe. The ending is also vague, I suppose deliberately so. Wynn tells the Hired Gun to leave the bag with the money, so I guess Walker gets the money? Though we don't see it explicitly.

Anyway, I just love the 60s look - the architecture, the cars, the hairstyles, the clothes. I loved the hamburger joint where Marvin and Dickinson ate with the giant windows. I loved her pad with the balcony that looked down on the living area. I loved O'Connor's sprawling retreat. I loved the technology! I guess mob millionaires had remote controls for their TVs in 1967 (Well, Jack Lemmon had one in The Apartment way back in 1960, and he was at best a middle-class schlub). Oh, yeah, I also dug O'Connor's primitive speaker phone, where he put the receiver in some kind of device so you suddenly had speaker phone.

The thing I missed the most? The screenplay, in its attempt to be ultra-cool, neglects to provide wronged gangster Lee Marvin with the one ingredient that is indispensable to the sort villainous hero he specialized in, namely humor. This is one of the few Lee Marvin films that contains not one memorable zinger, delivered in that patented, guttural drawl of his. It's worth a look, but I can see why 1967 audiences didn't take to it, with only one viewing to "get it".

I first saw this movie when I was in college in the Seventies. I viewed the film again in 2001. The power of the film was the same on my senses. Several reasons come up: British Director John Boorman was at his best trying to outdo Don Siegel's The Killers (1967)-which also stars Marvin and Dickinson in somewhat similar roles. I will really be surprised if Boorman denies that he was not influenced by the Siegel movie.

Why did Point Blank make an impact on me? Was it Lee Marvin's raw machismo? No. It was Boorman, who gave cinema a brilliant essay on alienation. When Dickinson's Chris asks Marvin's Walker 'What's my last name?' after a bout of sex and gets a repartee 'What's my first name?' you can argue the alienation is embedded in the dialog. But Boorman's cinema includes the loud footsteps of a determined Walker on the soundtrack, somewhat like Godard in Alpahaville, contrasting bright wide open spaces for the exchange of money that goes according to plan and closed dimly lit confines of Alcatraz for those that go wrong. There is laconic humor without laughter, pumping bullets into an empty bed, guards who narrowly miss Marvin going up the lift, the car salesman's interest in an attractive customer than in his job, the sharpshooter's smug satisfaction not realizing that he has got the wrong man…The list is endless.

The camera-work of Philip Lathrop is inventive, but was it Lathrop or Boorman that made the visual appeal of the Panavision format of this film come alive?

Viewing the film in 2001, several points emerge. $93,000 was important to Walker, nothing more nothing less. But was it money he was after or was it the value of an agreement among thieves? The open ended finale runs parallel to the end of an Arthur Penn film (also on alienation)called "Night Moves" made some 10 years later. What surprises me is how a good movie like Point Blank never won an award or even an Oscar nomination.