Point Blank

If there was ever a strong case for style over substance, it's Point Blank. At its heart is a rather simplistic story about a double-crossed heist-man named Walker (Lee Marvin) seeking his revenge and the money owed to him, but director John Boorman was heavily influenced by the French New Wave to approach this story in new ways (from a technical perspective). A lot of this comes down to editing (for example, the interweaving of different time periods) and a subversion of Hollywood gangster and action tropes that sees an increased emphasis on surface details over character motivations. If you're a Lee Marvin fan, this is essential Marvin territory, and if you're a fan of action-thrillers your life isn't complete without seeing Point Blank.

The film starts by intercutting between three different time periods in Walker's story - the before, during and after-points of a pivotal event that sets him on his mission of revenge. He takes part in a bungled robbery at an abandoned prison (Alcatraz) where he's betrayed and left for dead by his wife (Sharon Acker) and a guy named Reece (John Vernon). But Walker survives, and a pissed off Lee Marvin is not someone you should leave alive. Walker is contacted by a guy named Yost (Keenan Wynn) who offers him help in tracking down Reece and the criminal cartel he works for (a business-like mafia stand-in known only as 'The Organisation'). Walker eventually finds Reece around the halfway point of the film, but this isn't enough for him - he decides to try and collect Reece's debt from the Organisation itself, his need for reparation seeming unquenchable.

This is petty revenge played out like a grand silent opera, with silent slow-motion replays of violence and a deliberately ambiguous ending. The film builds on Walker's background as he relentlessly pursues the debt owed to him and Marvin is ice cold... no one liners, no winks to the camera, and deadly serious. There's a great scene (one of many great scenes) where Walker fights two men backstage at a club while diagetic music is provided by a live band, and Marvin is perfectly self-contained while beating the absolute crap out of them. This world that he's moving through seems to be almost exclusively made out of concrete, and Boorman uses somewhat disorientating cuts in time to establish an eerie dream-like mood (perhaps 'nightmare' is more accurate) - as if the frenzy of Walker's revenge has rendered time irrelevant (it's almost as if he's entered into a cold-minded 'beserk'-state). There's some really interesting use of cross-cutting within this, a good example is the scene where he marches down a hallway, and we cut back and forth between this and his wife going about her everyday business, the clicking of his boots like a ticking time bomb: he's coming for her!

I think if I was discerning enough to have a Top 100 films of all time list (and I may put this together eventually, one day) than this film would be on it.

DIRECTOR: John Boorman
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse. Based on the book The Hunter.
KEY ACTORS: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keennan Wynn, John Vernon, Carol Acker, Michael Strong

RELATED TEXTS:
- Based on the pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake.
- Rather poorly remade as Payback, starring Mel Gibson.
- Being remade again as Parker for a 2012 release, this time starring Jason Statham.
- See also Get Carter, The Limey, The Outfit, I Walk Alone, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Charley Varrick and Underworld U.S.A.