Fifty years on, there’s still nothing quite like… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Fifty years on, there’s still noth­ing quite like Point Blank

23 Sep 2017

Words by Joel Blackledge

Man in a suit standing on a beach, with a bridge and power lines in the background.
Man in a suit standing on a beach, with a bridge and power lines in the background.
Bleak in out­look, fever­ish in tone, John Boorman’s bril­liant crime noir remains an enig­mat­ic outlier.

1967 was a piv­otal year for Hol­ly­wood. Films like Bon­nie & Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Grad­u­ate sig­nalled the begin­ning of a new era for major stu­dios. Young direc­tors were giv­en new inde­pen­dence to embrace the chang­ing atti­tudes of the decade; their films char­ac­terised by both for­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion and con­cep­tu­al audac­i­ty. Even 50 years lat­er, many of these films have star­tling res­o­nance. But per­haps none are as strange and exhil­a­rat­ing as Point Blank.

Osten­si­bly, this hard­boiled crime-dra­ma fol­lows a con­ven­tion­al revenge nar­ra­tive. But British direc­tor John Boor­man, mak­ing his first US pro­duc­tion, approach­es the mate­r­i­al with prob­ing eccen­tric­i­ty. As well as the murki­er cor­ners of clas­sic film noir, Boor­man drew inspi­ra­tion from art pho­tog­ra­phy and the French New Wave, includ­ing Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less, which was itself speak­ing back’ to Amer­i­can crime movies. Such a transna­tion­al ping-pong of cul­tur­al influ­ences results in a film expe­ri­ence that feels at once famil­iar and bizarre.

Lee Mar­vin plays Walk­er, a thief who is dou­ble-crossed by his part­ner and left for dead. He vows vengeance but finds that he now must con­tend with a mys­te­ri­ous cor­po­rate hier­ar­chy whose true size and shape he can nev­er quite work out. The Los Ange­les he nav­i­gates is, in Boorman’s words, an emp­ty, ster­ile world”, all bright lights and hard edges that leave nowhere to hide. It’s a descen­dent of the seedy cityscape of Ray­mond Chan­dler, only more cor­po­rate, more anony­mous, and more hos­tile to one man work­ing alone.

Mar­vin was nev­er bet­ter than he is here. Walk­er is an unsmil­ing, grav­el-voiced anti­hero who is impos­si­bly tough and, as his name sug­gests, unstop­pable in his sin­gle-mind­ed pur­suit. Some hard men feel the need to grunt and growl, but so much of Marvin’s men­ac­ing pow­er comes from the fact that he doesn’t. When Walk­er decides to vis­it his wife Lynne (who left him for his dou­ble-cross­er), Boor­man cuts between mir­ror shots of her and the stern-faced Walk­er pac­ing down an emp­ty cor­ri­dor, until his even foot­steps form the per­cus­sion of a ris­ing crescen­do on the soundtrack.

Even­tu­al­ly, he bursts into her apart­ment, fires six bul­lets into her emp­ty bed, and then takes a seat. A dia­logue scene fol­lows – though only Lynne speaks. In the script Walk­er has lines, but Marvin’s per­for­mance is so effec­tive­ly min­i­mal that he knew the scene worked bet­ter with­out them. Such auda­cious exper­i­men­tal­ism is rare in genre cin­e­ma, but it sat­u­rates almost every shot.

Three people in a room, one woman and two men. Framed painting of a nude female figure on the wall.

What dis­tin­guish­es Point Blank from oth­er revenge thrillers is its dream­like, oth­er­world­ly tone. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Philip H Lath­rop cut his teeth work­ing with Orson Welles, anoth­er denizen of weird Hol­ly­wood, and here he con­jures dra­mat­ic widescreen com­po­si­tions that at times veer into the avant-garde. The chiaroscuro style of post­war noir is trans­plant­ed into the high­ly-sat­u­rat­ed colours and dra­mat­ic pat­terns of the 1960s, cre­at­ing a remark­ably vivid visu­al style. Lathrop’s use of reflec­tion and light ren­ders Los Ange­les an eerie and glassy space that doesn’t quite seem real.

In one mem­o­rable night­club scene, Walk­er fends off some goons dur­ing a back­stage brawl while viva­cious funk singer Stu Gard­ner riles up a rau­cous crowd out front. Dra­mat­ic close-ups of the audi­ence are inter­cut with the vio­lence, blur­ring the line between plea­sure and pain. The com­bi­na­tion of Gardner’s music, Marvin’s sto­ic per­for­mance, and the psy­che­del­ic lava lamp light­ing gives the sequence a hyp­not­ic energy.

More­over, the film boasts an unusu­al treat­ment of time, includ­ing flash­backs with a poet­ic rather than nar­ra­tive moti­va­tion and an inno­v­a­tive use of slow-motion that pre­cedes Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch by two years. It’s an intense­ly sub­jec­tive style, and one that has pro­duced the the­o­ry that the revenge sto­ry is in fact Walker’s fan­ta­sy as he lays dying.

These are bold ideas that crit­ics were unsure of at the film’s release, but Point Blank’s influ­ence on cin­e­ma is hard to under­state. The strug­gle of the indi­vid­ual to retain his auton­o­my in a cor­po­rate land­scape cer­tain­ly res­onat­ed in 1967, not least for the young New Hol­ly­wood auteurs who were hand­ed the keys to the city by stu­dios look­ing to inno­vate. Since its release, a host of promi­nent direc­tors who spin movie poet­ry from pulp fic­tion – Steven Soder­bergh, Nico­las Wind­ing Refn and Michael Mann cheif among them – have con­sis­tent­ly drawn from Point Blank for its effort­less blend of cool, smart and weird.

You might like