Lee Marvin doesn’t like what he sees in psychedelic noir POINT BLANK
POINT BLANK (John Boorman, 1967)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, December 1, 2:45, Sunday, December 2, 9:15, and Friday, December 7, 7:00
Series runs November 30 – December 10
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
John Boorman’s Point Blank is an oxymoronic psychedelic film noir, a violent psychological thriller about a determined man dead set on vengeance. Lee Marvin — on quite a hot streak following Cat Ballou, Ship of Fools, The Professionals, and The Dirty Dozen — stars as the one-named Walker, a sincere, old-fashioned man who is double-crossed by his wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), and friend, Mal Reese (John Vernon, in his film debut), when a deal goes bad on Alcatraz. Searching for Reese, Walker hooks up with Lynne’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), a sexy femme fatale who owns a hot club in the Bay Area. As Walker makes his way up the criminal organization ladder in his quest to get the $93,000 he’s owed, he leaves behind a bloody trail that keeps getting messier and messier. Adapted by Alexander Jacobs and David and Rafe Newhouse from Donald Westlake’s first Parker novel, The Hunter, Boorman’s film is like the antihero Walker himself, purposefully out of time and place. Walker is essentially an anachronism as he makes his way through Point Blank, evoking John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers. The Summer of Love seems to have had no effect on Walker, who still primarily dresses in dull colors — until Chris brings out the color in him, particularly in one memorable scene in which they both are wearing bright yellow and spy on Reese’s hideaway through a yellow telescope. Film noir is by definition set in a black-and-white world, but Walker can’t hide from the old ways anymore, as he shows when groovy colored lights flash on him in Chris’s club.
Although it was only Boorman’s (Deliverance, Hope and Glory) second film, Marvin gave him final cut, resulting in a wild, unusual ride further enhanced by Henry Berman’s machine-gun editing. The solid supporting cast includes Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, Lloyd Bochner, and James B. Sikking, with music by Johnny Mandel. The first film to be partially filmed on Alcatraz, Point Blank is a gritty crime procedural that has long been underrated and is more than worthy of another visit. Westlake’s book has also been the basis of Ringo Lam’s Full Contact with Chow Yun-fat, Brian Helgeland’s Payback with Mel Gibson, and Taylor Hackford’s Parker with Jason Statham (due out next year). Point Blank is screening as part of the fourth installment of Anthology Film Archives’ “From the Pen of . . .” series, which highlights the work of screenwriters and original sources whose work often gets overlooked if it doesn’t win an Oscar. The eleven-day festival also includes such films as Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, written by W. D. Richter based on a Jack Finney serial; Philip D’Antoni’s The Seven-Ups, written by Jacobs and Albert Reuben, with French Connection and Cruising cop Randy Jurgensen on hand to talk about the movie at the December 1 screening; and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, written by Waldo Salt based on the the novel by James Leo Herlihy.