Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin, co-starring Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn and Carroll O'Connor, and 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 grossed over $9 million at the box office in 1967 and has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.
In 2016, Point Blank was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.[4]
Plot
Walker works with his friend Mal Reese to rob a major crime operation, ambushing the courier on deserted Alcatraz Island. After counting the money, Reese shoots Walker, leaving him for dead. Reese takes the money and Walker's wife, Lynne. Walker recovers. With assistance from the mysterious Yost, Walker sets out to find Reese and recover his half of the money; $93,000. Reese used all of the money from the job to pay back a debt to a crime syndicate called "The Organization." Walker goes to Los Angeles, where he bursts in on Lynne and riddles her bed with bullets, only to find Reese has long since disappeared. Lynne is distraught; she takes an overdose of sleeping pills.
Walker approaches car dealer Stegman for information, smashing a new car and terrorizing him until Stegman says Reese is with Walker's sister-in-law, Chris.
Breaking in on Chris, he learns that she despises Reese and admires Walker. Willing to help in any way, Chris agrees to a sexual tryst with Reese inside his heavily guarded penthouse apartment, where she will 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. He then forces Reese, naked except for a bedsheet, to the balcony saying that both will go and meet Carter together. Suddenly, a bodyguard switches on the light in the room they just left, calling for Reese. Startled, Walker backs up quickly still holding on to Reese behind him by the bedsheet. Forced to back up himself, Reese accidentally goes over the side and plunges to his death. Walker, still grasping the bedsheet, watches him fall.
After next confronting Carter for his money, Walker is set up. A sniper is assigned to kill him at a money drop in the paved Los Angeles River bed. Walker, suspecting a trap, forces Carter to get the money instead. Carter and Stegman both get shot at the pickup. The sniper leaves; Walker tears open the package of money but finds only slips of blank paper.
Yost takes Walker to a house belonging to Brewster. Walker visits Chris in her apartment, which has been trashed by The Organization. He brings her with him to Brewster's house, claiming she will be safer with him. While waiting for Brewster, Chris slaps and punches Walker as he regards her impassively, not defending himself. She leaves the room. Walker hears noises from the kitchen and goes in to turn off several appliances that Chris has apparently turned on. She taunts him as "washed up" over a speaker system. He finds her playing pool; she turns on him and hits him in the head with a pool cue. They fall to the floor in an embrace, then go to bed and make love. The following morning, Brewster comes home and is ambushed by Walker, who demands his money. Walker forces Brewster to call Fairfax, but Fairfax refuses to pay. Brewster says the only cash available for Walker is in San Francisco. "The drop has changed, but the run is still the same", he explains.
At Fort Point, Walker refuses to show himself as the courier delivers the money. Hiding in the dark is the sniper, who shoots Brewster. Yost emerges from the shadows, telling Brewster that it was not Walker who shot him. Brewster calls out to Walker, "This is Fairfax, Walker! Kill him!"
Yost/Fairfax thanks Walker (who is still hiding in the darkness) for eliminating his dangerous underlings, telling him: "Our deal's done, Walker. Brewster was the last one." He offers a partnership, but Walker remains silent. Yost/Fairfax and the hitman go away while leaving the money on the ground.
It was the second film produced by Irwin Winkler who had just made Double Trouble at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Winkler and Judd Bernard became enthusiastic about the Point Blank script and felt it would be ideal for Lee Marvin. They struggled to get the script to Marvin, so sent it to John Boorman, an emerging director he knew from his management days.[5]
Boorman met Marvin in London, where the actor was shooting The Dirty Dozen. Boorman and Marvin talked about a script based on the book The Hunter by Donald Westlake. Both hated the script but loved Walker the main character. 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".[6]
MGM agreed to finance a budget of $2 million. MGM's head of production Robert Weitman wanted the female lead played by Stella Stevens but Boorman and Marvin insisted on Angie Dickinson. Winkler claims he was then not surprised to see Stevens cast in a subsequent MGM film, Sol Madrid.[7]
The unusual structure of the film was due in part to the original script which adhered to the non-linear structure of the novel and developments during the shooting of the film.[6][8] Rehearsals took place at Marvin's house in Los Angeles.[6] 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.[6]
This was the first film shot at Alcatraz Island, the infamous prison in San Francisco that had closed in 1963, only three years before the production. Two weeks in the abandoned prison facility required the services of 125 crew members.[9] While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed shooting on location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need to loop half the dialogue.[10] During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life Magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison.[9] Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.[6]
Director Boorman chose locations that were "stark". For example, the airplane terminal walkway down which Marvin walked originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the pots taken out to "make it all bare".[6] After Boorman showed the finished cut to executives, they were "very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots". Margaret Booth, supervising film editor working for MGM, told Boorman as the execs filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!"[6]
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."[11] Kael later called the film "intermittently dazzling".[12]Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said, "as suspense thrillers go, Point Blank is pretty good."[13] 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."[14]
In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described the movie as a "spectacularly stylized and vividly photographed film that hints at some of the complex organization and hideous humanity of the modern-day underworld" and that director Boorman had "done an amazing job of getting the look and smell of Los Angeles into the texture of his picture...But, holy smokes, what a candid and calculatedly sadistic film it is!....This is not a pretty picture for the youngsters--or, indeed, for anyone with indelicate taste."[15]
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."[16]
The film holds a score of 93% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 40 reviews with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Shot with hard-hitting inventiveness and performed with pitiless cool by Lee Marvin, Point Blank is a revenge thriller that exemplifies the genre's strengths with extreme prejudice."[17] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[18]
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 beginning. The film's director John Boorman claims to not have an opinion on the matter. "What it is, is what you see", responded Boorman. While filmmaker 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.[6]
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.[19] 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 has commented: "He could just as easily be a ghost or a shadow".[20] Some critics consider Point Blank, "a haunted, dream-like film that draws upon the spatial and temporal experiments of modernist European art cinema", especially the "time-fractured" films of French director Alain Resnais.[21][22]
Style
Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. The film features a fractured timeline (similar to the novel's non-linear structure), 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).[23][24] Boorman credits Marvin with coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film.[6] Boorman said that as the film progressed, scenes would be filmed monochromatically around one 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".[6][24]
To establish Walker's mythic stature, Soderbergh noted in the commentary, that the film cuts from a shot of Walker swimming from Alcatraz Island 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".[6]
Legacy
Point Blank is hailed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as "The perfect thriller in both form and vision."[25] Film historian David Thomson calls the film a masterpiece.[26] 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."[27] Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used stylistic touches from Point Blank many times in his filmmaking career.[6]
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.[6]
On March 29, 1968, Point Blank was screened at Cinelândia movie theaters in Brazil 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 coffins", and "They killed a student... what if it was your son?" were written by protesters on the movie posters. The aftermath of Souto's death was one of the first major public protests against the Brazilian military government.[28]
Lee Marvin expressed consternation with his role in the film years later. In a 1983 interview, when about watching himself onscreen, he responded "How did I feel when I saw myself on the screen? I found it very unpleasant recently when I saw a film of mine called Point Blank, which was a violent film. We made it for the violence. I was shocked at how violent it was. Of course, that was ten, fifteen, eighteen years ago. When I saw the film I literally almost could not stand up, I was so weak. I did that? I am capable of that kind of violence? See, there is the fright; and this is why I think guys back off eventually. They say, 'No, I'm not going to put myself to those demons again.' The demon being the self."[29]
Lee Marvin was an American film and television actor. Known for his bass voice and premature white hair, he is best remembered for playing hardboiled "tough guy" characters. Although initially typecast as the "heavy", he later gained prominence for portraying anti-heroes, such as Detective Lieutenant Frank Ballinger on the television series M Squad (1957–1960). Marvin's notable roles in film included Charlie Strom in The Killers (1964), Rico Fardan in The Professionals (1966), Major John Reisman in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ben Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (1969), Walker in Point Blank (1967), and the Sergeant in The Big Red One (1980).
The Terminator is a 1984 American science fiction action film co-written and directed by James Cameron and co-written and produced by Gale Anne Hurd. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son will one day save mankind from extinction by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence in a post-apocalyptic future. Kyle Reese is a soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah. The screenplay is credited to Cameron and Hurd, while co-writer William Wisher Jr. received an "additional dialogue" credit.
Zardoz is a 1974 science fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling. It depicts a post-apocalyptic world where barbarians worship the stone idol Zardoz while growing food for a hidden elite, the Eternals. The Brutal Zed becomes curious about Zardoz, and his curiosity forces a confrontation between the two camps.
Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film directed by John Sturges with screenplay by Millard Kaufman. It stars Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The film is a crime drama set in 1945 that contains elements of the revisionist Western genre. In the plot, a one-armed stranger (Tracy) comes to a small desert town and uncovers an evil secret that has corrupted the entire community.
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions often ran contrary to those of her contemporaries.
Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter who, with Orson Welles, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). Both Mankiewicz and Welles would go on to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film. He was previously a Berlin correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, assistant theater editor at The New York Times, and the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. Alexander Woollcott said that Mankiewicz was the "funniest man in New York".
Sir John Boorman is a British filmmaker. He is best known for directing feature films such as Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972), Zardoz (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985), Hope and Glory (1987), The General (1998), The Tailor of Panama (2001) and Queen and Country (2014).
Doris Grau was an American actress and script supervisor from Brooklyn. After moving to Hollywood in 1940, she began her career supervising film and television scripts. She continued to do this until the 1990s and worked on films such as Point Blank and King Kong and television shows such as Cheers and The Tracey Ullman Show. Grau did some acting in her later years, playing live-action and animated roles. On the sitcom The Simpsons, she worked as a script supervisor and provided the voice of Lunchlady Doris and other minor characters.
Irwin Winkler is an American film producer and director. He is the producer or director of over 58 motion pictures, dating back to 1967's Double Trouble, starring Elvis Presley. The fourth film he produced, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), starring Jane Fonda, was nominated for nine Academy Awards. He won an Oscar for Best Picture for 1976's Rocky. As a producer, he has been nominated for Best Picture for four films: Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Right Stuff (1983), and Goodfellas (1990).
Payback is a 1999 American neo-noir action thriller film written and directed by Brian Helgeland in his directorial debut, and starring Mel Gibson, Gregg Henry, Maria Bello, and David Paymer. It is based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake using the pseudonym Richard Stark, which had earlier been adapted into the 1967 film noir classic Point Blank, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin.
Sharon Eileen Acker was a Canadian film, stage, and television actress and model. She appeared mostly on television in Canada and the United States from 1956 to 1992. She played Della Street, Perry Mason's loyal secretary, in The New Perry Mason opposite Monte Markham. Her film roles include Lucky Jim, Point Blank and Don't Let the Angels Fall.
Bubble is a 2005 American crime drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh about three low-paid doll factory workers, one of whom is murdered. Soderbergh also shot and edited the film under the pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, taken from his father's given names and his mother's maiden name, respectively. The film was shot on high-definition video.
The Split is a 1968 American neo-noir crime drama film directed by Gordon Flemyng and written by Robert Sabaroff based upon the Parker novel The Seventh by Richard Stark.
Up the Sandbox is a 1972 American comedy-drama film directed by Irvin Kershner, with a screenplay by Paul Zindel, based on the novel of the same name by Anne Roiphe. The film stars Barbra Streisand as a young wife and mother in Manhattan, who slips into increasingly bizarre fantasies to escape the predicament of her pregnancy. The film's supporting cast includes David Selby, Paul Benedict, George S. Irving, Conrad Bain, Isabel Sanford, Lois Smith, Jacobo Morales as a character who closely resembles Fidel Castro, and Stockard Channing in her film debut.
Petulia is a 1968 drama film directed by Richard Lester and starring Julie Christie, George C. Scott and Richard Chamberlain. The film has a screenplay by Lawrence B. Marcus from a story by Barbara Turner and is based on the 1966 novel Me and the Arch Kook Petulia by John Haase. It was scored by John Barry.
Alice Adams is a 1935 romantic drama film directed by George Stevens and starring Katharine Hepburn. It was made by RKO and produced by Pandro S. Berman. The screenplay was by Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin. The film was adapted from the novel Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington. The music score was by Max Steiner and Roy Webb, and the cinematography by Robert De Grasse. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress.
Leo the Last is a 1970 British drama film co-written and directed by John Boorman, based on the play The Prince by George Tabori, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Billie Whitelaw.
The Spikes Gang is a 1974 American Western film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Lee Marvin. Produced by the Mirisch Company and based on the novel The Bank Robber by Giles Tippette, the supporting cast features Gary Grimes, Charles Martin Smith and Ron Howard. Veteran character actors Arthur Hunnicutt and Noah Beery, Jr. both appear in separate "scene-stealing" performances.
Alexander Jacobs was a screenwriter best known for his work in the action field. His writing style for Point Blank was very influential on Walter Hill.
"Raising Kane" is a 1971 book-length essay by American film critic Pauline Kael, in which she revived controversy over the authorship of the screenplay for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. Kael celebrated screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, first-credited co-author of the screenplay, and questioned the contributions of Orson Welles, who co-wrote, produced and directed the film, and performed the lead role. The 50,000-word essay was written for The Citizen Kane Book (1971), as an extended introduction to the shooting script by Mankiewicz and Welles. It first appeared in February 1971 in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker magazine. In the ensuing controversy, Welles was defended by colleagues, critics, biographers and scholars, but his reputation was damaged by its charges. The essay and Kael's assertions were later questioned after Welles's contributions to the screenplay were documented.
References
1 2 Thomas, Kevin (Jan 16, 1968). "CHARTOFF AND WINKLER: Entrepreneurs of the Offbeat Film Two Entrepreneurs of Offbeat Movies". Los Angeles Times. p.d1.
↑ "Big Rental Films of 1968", Variety, 8 January 1969 p 15. Please note this figure is a rental accruing to distributors.
↑ 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. ISBN978-0-7641-6151-3.
↑ Thomson, David (October 26, 2010). The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fifth Edition, Completely Updated and Expanded (Hardcover ed.). Knopf. p. 107. ISBN978-0-307-27174-7.
↑ Thomson, David (October 14, 2008). "Have You Seen . . .?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. New York: Random House. p. 680. ISBN978-0-307-26461-9.
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