Point Blank (1967) Review
9/10
A man is shot twice by his best friend on the floor of an abandoned prison cell, over a share of ninety-three thousand dollars, and left there. Then he is swimming. Then he is in Los Angeles, and he wants his money.
The 9 is for a crime film that uses avant-garde technique on pulp material and never once winks about it. The story is the simplest revenge structure available. The telling is fractured, elliptical and deliberately disorienting, and the friction between those two things is the whole picture.
The point I withhold is for a couple of the transitions, where the 1967 fashion for optical effects shows its age in a film that is otherwise timeless. Everything structural about it still works.
Marvin Handed Away His Own Power
Boorman was thirty-four, British, and had made one feature, a vehicle for the Dave Clark Five. MGM had a script based on Westlake’s The Hunter that nobody involved thought much of.
Marvin asked Boorman what he thought of it. Boorman said the script was poor and the central character was excellent. Marvin agreed and threw his copy away.
Then he did the thing that made the film possible. He called a meeting with the studio head, the producers and his agent, confirmed on the record that he had script approval and casting approval, and assigned both to Boorman. A first-time Hollywood director ended up with final cut on a major studio picture.
The film that resulted baffled the MGM executives at the screening, and there was talk of reshoots. Margaret Booth, who had been cutting film in Hollywood since the silent era, was in the room and told Boorman that nobody would touch a frame of it over her dead body. It went out uncut.
Authority given away deliberately is the rarest thing in any collaboration. Marvin had the power and could see that somebody else had the vision, and the interesting question is why almost nobody does this.
The answer is usually that the person with the power cannot articulate what they want and mistakes that for having no vision. Marvin knew exactly what he wanted, which was the character, and knew he was not the person to build the film around it.
Know which part is yours. If you can name the one element you are protecting, you can hand everything else to somebody better and lose nothing.
The Dying Dream Reading
The film supports a reading that everything after the opening is happening in Walker’s head as he dies in that cell, and Boorman plants it repeatedly instead of leaving it to chance.
The evidence is laid in plain sight. Walker somehow swims from Alcatraz, and the film cuts a tour guide explaining that nobody has ever escaped the island over the top of it. He is framed by bar-like shadows in rooms with no bars. He is told more than once to lie down and die. His benefactor, Yost, appears wherever he is needed and vanishes.
Walker also barely kills anybody. People die around him, from falls and from each other, and his direct kills are close to nonexistent. He moves through the organization like a condition and not a man.
The film never confirms it and does not need to. The reading changes what the ending means, since Walker steps back into shadow without the money at the exact moment it arrives, and either he was never going to take it or he was never there.
Boorman has said the film is a study of Lee Marvin, and both things can be true at once. Marvin had come out of the Pacific war with wounds and a great deal he did not discuss, and the performance is built on a stillness that reads as damage. Whatever Walker is, the man playing him understood absence.
The Sound and the Cutting
The technique is what people remember, and all of it is doing narrative work.
The corridor sequence is the best example. Walker’s footsteps hammer down an airport hallway, unnaturally loud, continuing over cuts to his wife going about her morning miles away. Sound arrives before the image it belongs to, and the effect is of a man approaching from outside time.
Boorman cuts to memory without warning and without a marker. A conversation in the present drops into Alcatraz for two frames and comes back. The audience is placed inside Walker’s disordered attention instead of watching it from outside.
Philip Lathrop shot it in hard modernist color, and the film is organized by it. Each sequence is dominated by a single hue, greens, then yellows, then greys, which was unusual in 1967 and gives a fractured story a spine the audience can follow without noticing.
Formal experiment earns its place when it reproduces a character’s mental state. The footsteps are not clever, they are Walker’s single-mindedness rendered as sound.
The organizing device matters as much as the experiment. Color blocks give a disordered narrative a shape, so the audience can be disoriented within a structure instead of simply lost.
In prose the equivalent is unmarked movement between present and memory, which works only if each departure returns something the present scene needed. Otherwise you have written confusion and called it interiority.
Ninety-Three Thousand Dollars
The sum matters and the film knows it. Walker wants exactly his share, no more, and every person he confronts tries to give him something else instead.
They offer him a job, a position in the organization, a woman, a car. Nobody can produce the cash, because the organization is a corporate structure that does not hold currency. It has accounts, offices, a chain of command and a filing system.
The best gag in the film is a man opening a safe in a suburban house and finding it stuffed with paperwork. Walker takes a bundle of it, looks at it, and drops it. Nothing in this world converts to what he came for, and nobody he asks can even understand the question. The organization has become too modern to be robbed.
That is the film’s joke and its argument. Walker is a nineteenth century figure demanding a physical object from an entity that has evolved past physical objects, and he is unstoppable precisely because his demand cannot be negotiated.
Carroll O’Connor plays one of the executives as a tired middle manager irritated by a personnel problem, and John Vernon’s Reese is a man who stole the money because he owed the organization, which makes the whole chain a matter of internal accounting.
Angie Dickinson gets the film’s strangest scene and its best. She beats Walker with both fists for a full minute while he stands there absorbing it, then exhausts herself and stops, and he has not moved or spoken. It is the clearest statement the film makes about what he has become.
It Flopped and Then It Did Not
The film cost about two and a half million dollars and took over nine million in rentals, and it was still considered a disappointment, partly because Marvin’s other 1967 picture was The Dirty Dozen and it took all the attention. A cold experimental thriller had no chance that year against a war picture with twelve stars in it.
What happened afterward is the more interesting story. It became a touchstone, cited by David Thomson among others, and its DNA runs through everything from the Parker adaptations that followed to the whole grammar of the modern revenge thriller.
Derek Kolstad has named it as a stylistic touchstone for John Wick, which is a straight line from 1967 to 2014: a man with one demand, an organization with rules, and violence as a professional procedure.
The novel is worth reading alongside it. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, made Parker a working professional with no interior life at all, and the film’s contribution is to take that emptiness literally and ask what remains of a man with nothing inside him.
A protagonist with no stated interior can work if the world around him supplies the reactions. Everybody Walker meets tells us what he is, and he never tells us anything.
The technique fails when the character is merely underwritten. The distinction is whether the absence is the subject. Here it is, which is why the dying dream reading is available at all.
Renaming matters more than it looks. Westlake’s Parker became Boorman’s Walker, and the new name is what the character does. He walks toward people until something happens.
Should you watch Point Blank?
Yes, and watch the corridor sequence twice. This is a pulp revenge story told with the tools of European art cinema by a director who had never made a Hollywood film, and it is the point where the American crime picture stopped being realist and started being subjective.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists