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Point Blank
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by MGM (Warner)
Sales Rank: 18157
Price: $19.98
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Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel <I>The Hunter</I> (remade by Brian Helgeland as <I>Payback</I>), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and assisted by Angie Dickinson, as he desperately searches for someone, anyone, who can just give him his money. But if Walker is an extreme incarnation of the revenge-driven noir antihero, the modern syndicate has been transformed into a world of paper jungles and corporate businessmen, an alienating concept to the two-fisted, gun-wielding gangster. Boorman creates a hard, austere look for the film and fragments the story with flashes of painful memory, grafting the New Wave onto old genres with confidence and style. Haunting and brutal, <i>Point Blank</i> remains one of the most distinctive crime thrillers ever made. <I>--Sean Axmaker</I>
Viewer Reviews
When his buddy, Mal Reese, with his wife, Lynne, looking on, puts two bullets into Walker right after they've high-jacked a big haul on Alcatraz island, Walker gets mad...and then gets even. Walker somehow survives those gunshots and a year later he returns. For the next hour and a half, Walker (Lee Marvin) is going to say once if he says it ten times, "I want my money back." The Organization is not about to accommodate Walker, even if Walker's money is only a measly $93,000. That includes Reese, who now has Walker's wife and who has become one of the Organization's top men, all of whom look like business CEOs. While Walker relentlessly goes after his money and works his way up the corporate criminal ladder, he leaves a trail of corpses behind. Walker is shrewd, violent and deadpan, and he won't take "No" for an answer. That sums up Point Blank.
It must have been tiring having to prove in life and in the movies that he really was the tough-as-nails, seen-it-all, uber-macho main man, part bully, part cynic. For me, Lee Marvin was at his best playing secondary character roles. As a lead, more often than not he simply brought more of the same to the screen, but in a larger frame. He was queasily watchable in, for instance, The Big Heat, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Men From Now (Special Collector's Edition) and, much later with star billing but in a character part, Gorky Park. But it was just pow, smash, bang in most of his star vehicles. If he'd been more willing to break out of his star persona, he might have been a memorable actor, not just a star. He did a superior job in the one role where he deliberately took a big risk, playing Hickey in the American Film Theater's television presentation of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. He not only placed himself deep in a complex role, he was working with very good actors, notably Robert Ryan and Fredric March. Marvin did a fine job, but then immediately returned to the same old same old.
As for Point Blank, there's no doubt that John Boorman keeps it moving, throws in some perhaps unintended as well as intended irony and a lot of intended violence. He keeps the focus on the relentless Walker and Marvin doesn't disappoint. Point Blank also hasn't aged very well, in my view, even with Marvin's dynamically impassive (or impassively dynamic) performance, with the artsy clomp clomp clomp of Walker's shoes and Lynne's monologue with flashbacks as examples. A strong plus is the performances of the secondary characters, especially Carroll O'Connor and Keenan Wynn. With all that deadpan relentlessness, I just can't get out of my mind what Mel Brooks could have done with Point Blank.
The DVD transfer looks just fine. There is a commentary track which features John Boorman and Steven Soderberg chatting together, as well as a couple of shorts on Alcatraz. If you visit San Francisco, don't forget to save a morning or afternoon for the boat ride to the island and the tour of the federal prison. It closed in 1963 and is a grim and interesting place. For those who may not know John Boorman very well, he's a fine director who, for the most part, managed to make his films his way. I especially like Deliverance (Deluxe Edition), Hope and Glory, The Emerald Forest and The General.
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