![]() ![]() John Vernon stands out as the treacherous mobster, begging Walker to help him in a roomful of loud men. Marvin is a Golem with a magnum pistol, gray-haired and wearing a constant mask-like expression. The only visual cliché is one mannered shot of characters posed 'just so' in a shattered mirror. Images are diffracted through gratings and a psychedelic light show at a disco nightclub is used as a wild setting for a brutal fistfight. Perfumes and unguents mix in the bottom of a bathtub, another prophetic image from 2001. It's an abstract illustration of relationship problems that would be worthy of Jacques Tati, if he made violent movies.īoorman frames a steady stream of bizarre visuals through Philip Lathrop's wide-angled Panavision lens. He stands like an immovable rock until she collapses in exhaustion. The second best image in the show is the sight of Dickinson losing her composure and hitting, slapping and slugging Marvin as hard as she can. Point Blank flirts with nudity as regards Angie Dickinson, who helps Walker but is frustrated by his lack of feeling. ![]() He suckers Lloyd Bochner's Carter, an unlikable bully, into stepping into his own death trap. There's great fun to be had watching Walker decimate their best killers. But our Walker unaccountably turns up a year later with a full wardrobe of undefined origin, to make short work of one mob functionary after another.Īfter a classic crash-'em car ride with John Stegman, Walker works his way upward through the mob hierarchy, a faceless corporation of ruthless executives that carry no money but wield excessive power. He then hobbles painfully into the currents of San Francisco Bay that routinely sweep even strong swimmers out to sea. Rationally speaking the story makes no sense, as Walker is twice shot point-blank in an Alcatraz cell. Jump cuts leap ahead in time exactly as would Kubrick's 2001 the next year. The moment of Walker's shooting in Alcatraz is repeated at least five times and scene after scene unfolds in a weird limbo that co-exists with everyday Los Angeles reality (something L.A. It's interesting that just five or six years after Last Year at Marienbad, ordinary American audiences would have no trouble following the time-fractured exploits of a (possibly) ghostly hit man. Point Blank is a simple revenge and payback story boiled down to its existential essence, and then pumped up with a visual treatment that resembles the work of Alain Resnais. Marvin's Walker crashes through a doorway to strong-arm his ex-wife and shoot big black holes in her empty bed: it plays like a ballet yet is one of the more violent actions in any movie of the 1960s. The most dynamic moments are frequently repeated in flashbacks, often in slow motion. Yet John Boorman has a natural understanding of hardboiled intrigue and powerhouse action scenes. This essential LA gangster film was made by a UK director whose only previous feature was a musical about the Dave Clark Five. The key image in Point Blank is massive Lee Marvin striding down the old LAX corridors like a robot on overdrive, inter-cut jarringly with intimate shots of Sharon Acker putting on her makeup. The way he behaves, he indeed may be some kind of a ghost. Chris accuses Walker of being a monomaniacal zombie. Walker locates Lynne but eventually uses her sister Chris (Angie Dickinson) to track down Mal, Big John Stegman (Michael Strong), Fred Carter (Lloyd Bochner) and finally the top man Brewster (Carrol O'Connor). Walker is after the 93 thousand dollars he's owed, and Yost wants a bunch of syndicate middlemen eliminated. A year later, he turns up alive and well, guided by a man named Yost (Keenan Wynn) on a quest into the criminal underworld. dreamscape was perfect head-trip material.įun-loving Walker (Lee Marvin) is shot and left for dead during a robbery by his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his best friend Mal Reese (John Vernon). It continued to play in frequent Los Angeles revivals and midnight shows for five or six years, where one could always detect a certain tobacco-like aroma. This movie about a Hit Man with a serious case of Antonioni-itis cleaned up theatrically alongside Warners' other popular 1967 bloodbath, Bonnie & Clyde. Point Blank was filmed long after the official end of the noir era but exhibits several of its classic themes. Produced by Judd Bernard, Robert Chartoff Written by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse from the novel The Hunterby Richard Stark (Donald E. Lloyd Bochner, Michael Strong, John Vernon, Sharon Acker, James SikkingĪrt Direction Albert Brenner, George W. Starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O'Connor, ![]()
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