1967: Point Blank

Point Blank (Boorman, 1967) 8/10

In the late Sixties, the fabled studio system began to disintegrate as major studios such as MGM continued to put millions into films employing antiquated narrative structures, characters and storylines. Desperate to re-invigorate their product, the studios reluctantly turned to younger directors to alleviate their woes; ushering in the American New Wave and the decade-long cult of the director in Hollywood.

One of the first directors to reap the fruits of this shift was not American, but rather a thirty-four year old English television director, whose only previous feature effort was a film about the Dave Clark Five. After meeting Lee Marvin in London, while the former was filming Robert Aldrich's classic The Dirty Dozen, John Boorman began to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a picture based on a novel called "The Hunter." Encouraged by their discussions, Marvin and Boorman proceeded with the project, which capitalized on Marvin's recent success at the Academy Awards for his against type performance in Cat Ballou.

With an Academy Award on his mantelpiece, MGM had given Marvin a sumptuous package including cast and script approval, and most importantly final cut on his next project. To the studio's puzzlement, Marvin passed all of these privileges onto his novice director. The result was Point Blank one of those structurally complex and visually pulsating films ever to come out of any major Hollywood studio.

Beginning on the abandoned penal island of Alcatraz, Point Blank captures the story of Walker (Lee Marvin): a stone-faced thief who is shot and left for dead by his wife Lynne (Sharon Ackler) and acquaintance Mal Reese (John Vernon) during a diamond-smuggling drop on The Rock. Nevertheless, Walker seemingly survives his fatal wound and begins a quest for revenge against his former friend and wife, as well as the re-acquisition of his $93,000 cut of the loot. With the help of the mysterious Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson), Walker tracks down his assailants only to discover that modern retribution is not so clear-cut.

John Boorman's Point Blank is a hallucinatory neo-Noir fleshed out in brutal pulpy violence, jazzy Technicolor and existential malaise. Shot in the style of a European art film, Point Blank owes its influence more to Antonioni and Godard in its architectural composions and jagged narrative than Fritz Lang or John Huston. There are also symmetrical connections to the protagaonists of revisionist westerns such as John Ford's The Searchers of the alienated anti-hero seeking out his brand of justice in a world which can no longer accomodate him. Furthermore like Antonioni's L'Avventura or Godard's Alphaville, Point Blank is a critique on the sense of detachment and artificiality that pervades modern life in Western societies.

Marvin's Walker is an anachronism: a descendent of an era of directness trapped in a world of abstraction. Walker views the world in black and white, but resides in a culture of hyperactive Technicolor. In earlier times, Walker's expedition would have been horizontal in its finality: two foes re-acquaint to settle their dispute in a manner acquiescent with their values. But in 1960's California, Walker's search is riddled with trapdoors, false moves and ambiguities. When Walker catches up with Mal Reese in his L.A. penthouse suite, one would expect Walker would be repaid and his honour satisfied. But instead, we see a world of cowardly crooks and non-deferrable debts. The Organization, an enigmatic corporate syndicate for whom Reese works for refuses to pay Walker any of Reese's financial debts. Walker can eradicate Mal, but to do so would liquidate the opportunity for Walker to reclaim his desired $93,000.

Housed in their stately high-rise offices, the Organization masquerade as a respectable network with car dealerships and palatial accomodations. Walker's strong-arm tactics mean little to men like Reese, or his bosses Carter (Lloyd Bochner) and Brewster (Carrol O'Connor). These men are proponents of a new brand of crime based on marketing, presentation and duplicity: a world of corporate crime in which cash in a non-entity and is replaced by stocks, bonds, cheques and other digitized sources of capital. Unlike the strong men of the Old West, these new antagonists are unafraid of squealing or deferring responsbility.

By yielding accountability elsewhere, they are opening up opportunities for their ascension up the corporate ladder. Yet, this labyrinthine process of bureaucratic hierarchy is foreign to Walker, whose frustration boils over when he discovers none of these men are have $93,000 to give to him, nor are willing to do so. Brewster even chimes he only has $11 on him in hard cash, despite living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

Amongst the neon lights and mechanized kitchens, Walker is a frustrated stranger. Like a stern inversion of Tati's Monsieur Hulot in Mon Oncle, Walker is antagonized by electronic devices. Furthermore, in his detached interactions with others, we see that Walker lacks the social capability to survive in a deceptive world. Through Boorman's repetitive use of flashbacks and flashforwards, the awkwardness of Marvin's character comes through. His relationship with his sister-in-law sees her attack his body in vexation without the stony Walker flinching a muscle or commenting. Marvin's superb performance speaks loudly through the actor's body language rather than his sparse dialogue. The homoerotic nature of his earlier relationship with Reese transforms into a menage a trois as the latter, Walker and his wife Lynne are seen intimately spending time with each other on car rides and so forth.

Boorman amplifies Walker's detachment from modernity in his selection of locations: concentrated into cold and monotonous architectural constructions such as the array of concrete overpasses, car garages and storm drains which Walker traverses through or the glass and steel buildings as monolithic and faceless as the Organization itself. The experimental colour patterns in the film also register this aura of conformity through repetitious textures and tones. Yet, even when Walker enters a psychedelic jazz club in San Francisco, the notion of a man who does not belong in this world bleeds through as blistering colour drains off his face.

Walker's separation to the modern world is also emphasized in two key thematic approaches to the film. Boorman's emphasis on cell imagery in the placement of blinds, windows and architectural space heightens the claustrophobia and paranoia within Walker. The film's repeated trap motifs are also clearly delineated in the doors and staircase leading to Reese's apartment and the yellow garment worn by Chris that appears to represent prison stripes. The trap is further embellished in the use of buildings and areas were escape seems to be quartered off by hard walls and fixed windows. Yet, Boorman also shows Walker's distinctiveness in a far more abstract and surreal method.

Throughout Point Blank Walker is epitomized as a deceased man. His friends all believe him to be dead and like the characters in Sergio Leone's westerns, he lacks a family compound to return to afterwards. Using dreamlike imagery through slow motion, physically weak supporting characters and the film's jarring editing, we see a film that proposes that the lead character may be dead or dying and that the images he sees are merely a) moments of his life and his future ambitions flashing before him and b) that these ambitions are played out without any resistance from other characters. Although Walker threatens characters, we never see him actually kill anybody. Instead characters die through accidental circumstances, which heightens Walker's lust for revenge: even though he reluctantly begins to realize he has no idea why he needs the $93,000 beyond his skewed principle of reclaiming something that did not belong to him in the first place.

Cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop uses anamorphic widescreen cinematography to its full potential in capturing the disconnection between characters and society. Through his hyperactive use of Technicolor and dreamlike use of slow-motion, Lathrop is able to allude to the possibility that Walker is no longer living and that everything in the film is an apparition inside Walker's mind. The film's experimental editing techniques are also extremely effective in progressing this notion; particularly in two celebrated scenes: the first when Walker hurridedly walks through the corridors of LAX with the sounds of his shoes clicking against the floor like a ticking clock, as editor Henry Berman intercuts images of his wife preparing herself for destiny; the second shows Marvin rolling around in bed with his sister-in-law Chris intercut to images of the film's other couples performing the same act. This is part of the film's emphasis on repetition: documenting the cyclical nature of Walker's actions and pushing forth the possibility that Walker is imagining the entire narrative.

Released in 1967, Point Blank failed at the American box-office, but gained a cult following from directors such as Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. Lured into the media firestorm over Hollywood violence, the film utilizes violence to capture the spiritual emptiness of its cunning protagonist. On the film's commentary ardent Point Blank admirer and director of Traffic Steven Soderbergh notes that Lee Marvin's character is mythic in his stature, approach and disposition. Thus, we can see how his character is in many ways an anti-hero of 1950's Westerns who has been transplanted to the urban world of greed and vengence studied in Noir.

However, it is also interesting to see how Point Blank in its urban setting preceded several films of the late Sixties and early Seventies which focused on autocratic police or crime figures attempting to replicate older codes of justice into an increasingly hostile world. Films such as Get Carter, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Madigan, The Detective and Serpico took the codes of the Western anti-hero and relocated them to urban enclaves like Boorman had done in Point Blank, yet without hardly any of the visual abstraction, aesthetic style, existential crises or lead presence that Boorman was able to achieve.

* Point Blank is available through Warner Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque