Point Blank (1967 film)

Point Blank

The poster features an image of Lee Marvin's face beside a hand holding a gun with ripples of white radiating from the gun barrel. The image is tinted various areas with shades of green, red, and blue. The tagline reads, "There are only two kinds of people in his up-tight world: his victims and his women. And sometimes you can't tell them apart."

original theatrical poster
Directed by John Boorman
Produced by Judd Bernard
Robert Chartoff
Screenplay by Alexander Jacobs
David Newhouse
Rafe Newhouse
Based on The Hunter
by Richard Stark
Starring Lee Marvin
Music by Johnny Mandel
Cinematography Philip H. Lathrop
Edited by Henry Berman
Production
company
Judd Bernard-Irwin Winkler Production
Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates
  • August 30, 1967 (1967-08-30) (SF premiere)
Running time
 92 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $2.5 million[1]
Box office $3,200,000 (US/ Canada)[2]

Point Blank is a 1967 American neo-noir crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin and featuring Angie Dickinson, adapted from the 1963 crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark.[3] Boorman directed the film at Marvin's request and Marvin played a central role in the film's development. The film was not a box office success in 1967, but has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.

Plot

Professional criminal Walker (Lee Marvin) works together with his friend, gangster Mal Reese (John Vernon), to steal a large amount of cash from a courier transporting funds for a major gambling operation, with the deserted Alcatraz island as a drop point. Reese then double-crosses Walker by shooting him, leaving him for dead. Reese also makes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker).

Walker manages to recover from his injuries. With assistance from the mysterious Yost (Keenan Wynn), who seems to know everything about everybody involved in the heist, Walker sets out to find Reese, take his revenge, and recover the $93,000 he is owed. Reese used all of the money from the job to pay back a debt to a powerful crime syndicate, "The Organization", and get back in its good graces.

With memories of happy times together, Walker goes to Los Angeles to pay back his wife and his best friend for their treachery. He bursts in on Lynne and riddles her bed with bullets, just in case Reese is in it. A distraught Lynne tells him she no longer wants to live, then takes an overdose of sleeping pills.

Walker is told a car dealer named Stegman (Michael Strong) might know where Reese can be found. Posing as a customer, he takes Stegman for a wild ride in one of his new cars, smashing the car and terrorising him, until Stegman reveals where Reese is living. He is told Reese has now taken up with Walker's sister-in-law, Chris (Angie Dickinson).

Breaking in on Chris, he learns she actually despises Reese, and had considered Walker the best thing ever to happen to her sister.

Willing to help in any way, Chris agrees to a sexual tryst with Reese, inside his heavily guarded penthouse apartment, just so she can gain access and unbolt a door for Walker. Walker ties up some men in an apartment across from the penthouse, and has a call made to police to report a robbery, creating a diversion that enables him to slip into the penthouse.

With a gun to Reese's head, Walker persuades him to give up the names of his Organization superiors—Carter, Brewster, and Fairfax—so he can make somebody pay back his $93,000. Reese says he'll help Walker. Walker attempts to quickly move Reese to the balcony by yanking on the blanket Reese has wrapped around himself. However, whether due to too much force or Reese attempting to get away from Walker, Reese is flung over the railing of the balcony, and Walker watches as a naked Reese plunges to his death on the street below.

Walker next confronts Carter (Lloyd Bochner) for his money, and Carter promises to pay. Carter gives a package, which he says contains the $93,000, to Stegman. When Stegman questions why he was chosen for this task, Carter says it's because he knows what Walker looks like. In fact, Carter is trying to set Walker up.

Stegman arrives at the destination (the Los Angeles River) and is standing out in the open on the river's dry concrete bed. Carter has followed to watch surreptitiously. Just as Carter is feeling comfortable, Walker jumps out from behind him, surprising Carter. Walker puts Carter in a choke-hold, telling him to go get the package from Stegman and bring it to Walker.

Unbeknownst to Stegman, a hit man (James Sikking) with a high-powered rifle has been posted hundreds of yards away, to kill Walker when the transfer takes place. Carter knows the hit man is aiming his rifle at that very second, and as Stegman tries to understand why Carter is there, Carter frantically waves his arms, hoping that the hit man will see he is not Walker.

Instead, the hit man fires, and Carter drops. As the reality of the situation becomes clear to Stegman, he tries to escape by walking quickly across the vast, desolate stretch of the river bed, only to also be shot dead as well.

While the hit man packs up his weapon on the bridge, Walker cautiously goes over to the package, and when he rips it open, discovers that it is packed with nothing but paper.

Yost takes Walker to a home belonging to Brewster (Carroll O'Connor). Walker visits Chris in her apartment, which was trashed by the Organization. He brings her with him to Brewster's home, claiming she will be safer with him than by herself.

As Walker waits for Brewster to return, an angry Chris starts slapping and pounding Walker, over his apparent disinterest in her. As Chris continues to punch him, Walker regards her impassively, not defending himself. After Chris hits Walker over the head with a pool cue, the two become entangled beneath the pool table, and their anger turns passionate. They make love.

The following morning, Brewster comes home and is ambushed by Walker, who demands his money. Brewster insists no one will pay. Walker forces Brewster to make a phone call to the Organization to get his money. Brewster speaks with a Mr. Fairfax, telling him that if they do not pay the money, he is going to be shot, but Fairfax refuses to pay, saying, "Threatening phone calls don't impress me."

Walker then shoots the phone.

Brewster says that they can still get him the money up in San Francisco through "The Alcatraz Run," in which large sums of money change hands. "The drop has changed, but the run is still the same," explains Brewster.

They travel to Fort Point in San Francisco. Walker does not trust Brewster. As Brewster stands in the open space of a courtyard, we see Walker, high above and hidden in the darkness, refusing to show himself.

Brewster receives the money by a courier in a helicopter. The hit man is also in the darkness with his rifle. He shoots Brewster, who falls to the ground, thinking Walker has shot him.

Yost emerges from the shadows, telling him it was not Walker who shot him. Brewster calls out to Walker, "This is Fairfax, Walker! Kill him!"

Yost/Fairfax thanks Walker, still hiding in the shadows, for eliminating his dangerous underlings, telling him, "Our deal's done, Walker. Brewster was the last one." Fairfax then offers Walker an enforcer job, claiming he has looked for a man like Walker for years. Walker stays hidden and does not answer.

The hit man is about to pick up the package containing the money, but Fairfax tells him to leave it. Walker remains unseen as the two men leave.

Cast
  • Kathleen Freeman as First Citizen
  • Victor Creatore as Carter's Man
  • Lawrence Hauben as Car Salesman
  • Susan Holloway as Girl Customer
  • Sid Haig as 1st Penthouse Lobby Guard
  • Michael Bell as Second Penthouse Lobby Guard
  • Priscilla Boyd as Receptionist
  • John McMurtry as Messenger
  • Ron Walters and George Strattan as Two Young Men in Apartment
  • Nicole Rogell as Carter's secretary
  • Rico Cattani and Roland LaStarza as Reese's guards

Production

Director Boorman met Marvin while on the set of The Dirty Dozen in London. Boorman and Marvin talked about a script based on the book The Hunter. Both hated the script, but loved the main character of Walker. When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin discarded the script and called a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent, and Boorman. As Boorman recalled, "[Marvin] said, 'I have script approval?' They said 'yes'. 'And I have approval of principal cast?'. 'Yes'. He said, 'I defer all those approvals to John [Boorman].' And he walked out. So on my very first film in Hollywood, I had final cut and I made use of it."[4]

The unusual structure of the film was due in part to the original script and developments during the course of shooting the film.[4][5] Rehearsals took place at Marvin's house in Los Angeles.[4] On the rehearsal day in which Marvin was to ask Sharon Acker what happened to the money, Marvin did not say his lines, forcing Acker to continue the conversation on her own. "I saw right away he was right," replied Boorman, "Lee never made suggestions. He would just show you." So Boorman changed the lines in the script so that Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin's questions, and the result is in the finished film. "It made a conventional scene something more," added Boorman.[4]

This was the first film ever to shoot at Alcatraz, the infamous prison which had been shut down since 1963, only three years before the production. Two weeks in the abandoned prison facility required the services of 125 crew members.[6] While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed shooting on location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need to loop half the dialogue.[7] During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison.[6] Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.[4]

Director Boorman chose locations that were "stark". For example, the airplane terminal walkway that Marvin walked down originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the pots taken out to "make it all bare."[4]

After Boorman showed the finished cut to executives, they were "very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots". Margaret Booth, a legendarily tradition-minded supervising editor then working for the studio, told Boorman as the execs filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!"[4]

Reception

Box office

The film earned $9 million during its initial release.[1]

Critical

In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: "A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is."[8] Kael later called the film "intermittently dazzling".[9] Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said "as suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good."[10] Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars: "Taut thriller, ignored in 1967, but now regarded as a top film of the decade."[11]

Slant reviewer Nick Schager notes in a 2003 review: "What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman's virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism."[12]

The film has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[13]

Themes

Viewers and critics have often questioned whether or not the film is really a dream that Walker has after he is shot in the very beginning. Director Boorman claims to not have an opinion on the matter. "What it is is what you see," responded Boorman. Steven Soderbergh has described Point Blank as "memory film" for Marvin. Boorman believes the film is about Lee Marvin's brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized him and left him desperately searching for his humanity.[4]

Critic David Thomson has written that the character of Walker is actually dead throughout the entire movie and the events of the film are a dream of the accumulating stages of revenge.[14] Others have also considered this concept: Brynn White has questioned whether or not Walker is a mortal or a ghost, "a vaporous embodiment of bitter vengeance barely clinging to Boorman’s variegated frames", and Boorman himself has commented that: "He could just as easily be a ghost or a shadow".[15] Some critics consider Point Blank, "a haunted, dream-like film that draws upon the spatial and temporal experiments of modernist European art cinema",[16] especially the "time-fractured" films of French director Alain Resnais.[17]

Style

Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. The film features a fractured time-line, disconcerting narrative rhythms (long, slow passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence) and a carefully calculated use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping bridges, empty prison cells).[18] Boorman credits Marvin with coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film.[4] Boorman said that as the film progressed, scenes would be filmed monochromatically around one particular color (the chilly blues and grays of Acker's apartment, Dickinson's butter yellow bathrobe, the startling red wall in Vernon's penthouse) to give the proceedings a "sort of unreality".[4][18]

To establish Walker's mythic stature, Soderbergh noted in the commentary that the film cuts from a shot of Walker swimming from Alcatraz to a shot of him on a ferry overlooking the same island while a woman on the loudspeaker describes the impossibility of leaving the island. Soderbergh said that this contrast of the character's ease of escape with the loudspeaker's monologue makes the Walker character "mythic immediately."[4]

Legacy

Point Blank is hailed in the book 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as "The perfect thriller in both form and vision."[19] Film historian David Thomson calls the film a masterpiece.[20] Thomson adds, "[...] this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it's singin' in the rain again, the white lie that erases night."[21] Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used stylistic touches from Point Blank many times in his filmmaking career.[4]

The Hunter was also the basis for Brian Helgeland's Payback (1999), starring Mel Gibson. Director Boorman has joked that Payback was so bad that Gibson must have taken the original script for Point Blank that Boorman and Marvin had thrown out.[4]

Influence

On March 29, 1968, Point Blank was screened at Cinelândia movie theaters to protest the murder of 18-year-old high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto by the military police of Rio de Janeiro. Souto was shot at point-blank range. Phrases such as "Do bullets kill hunger?", "Old people in power, young people in coffin", and "They killed a student... what if it was your son?" were written by protesters in the movie posters. The aftermath of Souto's death was one of the first major public protests against the Brazilian military government.[22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 CHARTOFF AND WINKLER: Entrepreneurs of the Offbeat Film Two Entrepreneurs of Offbeat Movies Thomas, Kevin. Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File) [Los Angeles, Calif] 16 Jan 1968: d1.
  2. ↑ "Big Rental Films of 1968", Variety, 8 January 1969 p 15. Please note this figure is a rental accruing to distributors.
  3. ↑ Point Blank at the American Film Institute Catalog
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Commentary by John Boorman and Steven Soderbergh. [DVD audio commentary]. Turner Entertainment. 2005.
  5. ↑ Shea, Matt (February 6, 2009). "RETROSPECT: POINT BLANK (1967)". Screentrek.com. Retrieved 2011-01-19.
  6. 1 2 The Rock: Part 1. [Featurette]. Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA: MGM. 1968.
  7. ↑ The Rock: Part 2. [Featurette]. Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA: MGM. 1968.
  8. ↑ Kael, Pauline (1968). Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 0-7145-0658-3.
  9. ↑ Kael, Pauline (1991). 5001 Nights at the Movies. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-1367-9.
  10. ↑ Ebert, Roger (October 20, 1967). "Point Blank". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2006-09-12.
  11. ↑ Maltin, Leonard (August 2008). Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide (2009 ed.). New York, NY: Penguin Group. p. 1081. ISBN 978-0-452-28978-9.
  12. ↑ Schager, Nick (July 24, 2003). "Point Blank". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 2007-09-21.
  13. ↑ "Point Blank". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
  14. ↑ Thomson, David (2012). The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. New York: Macmillan. p. 406. ISBN 978-0-374-19189-4. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  15. ↑ Ruffles, Tom (2004). Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 237. ISBN 0-7864-2005-7. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  16. ↑ Danks, Adrian. "A Man Out of Time: John Boorman and Lee Marvin's Point Blank". Senses of Cinema. Film Victoria, Australia. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  17. ↑ Erickson, Glenn. "Point Blank". TCM Classic Movies. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  18. 1 2 Applegate, Tim (2002). "Remaking Point Blank". The Film Journal (8). Retrieved 2011-01-19.
  19. ↑ Schneider, Stephen Jay (Editor) (October 1, 2008). 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Fifth ed.). Hauppauge, New York: Barron's Educational Series. p. 472. ISBN 978-0-7641-6151-3.
  20. ↑ Thomson, David (October 26, 2010). The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fifth Edition, Completely Updated and Expanded (Hardcover ed.). Knopf. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-307-27174-7.
  21. ↑ Thomson, David (October 14, 2008). "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. New York, NY: Random House. p. 680. ISBN 978-0-307-26461-9.
  22. ↑ (Portuguese) "Brasil 1968: "Mataram um estudante. Podia ser seu filho". Esquerda.Net. May 12, 2008. (originally published in O Globo on March 2, 2008).

External links

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