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’s swimming. Then he’s 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’s otherwise timeless. Everything structural about it still works.
Few crime pictures grip me the way this one does. Marvin barely speaks and still owns every room he walks into, and Boorman cuts the film like a nightmare you can’t wake from. I find it cold and strange and completely hypnotic, and I’d put it near the top of any list of American crime films.
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’d 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.
I’d like to shake Margaret Booth’s hand for that. The executives wanted to sand the strangeness off, and she’s the reason the film I care about exists at all.
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 can’t articulate what they want and mistakes that for having no vision. Marvin knew exactly what he wanted, which was the character, and knew he wasn’t the person to build the film around it. Know which part is yours. If you can name the one element you’re protecting, you can hand everything else to somebody better and lose nothing.
The Dying Dream Reading
One reading the film supports is 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’s framed by bar-like shadows in rooms with no bars. He’s told more than once to lie down and die. His benefactor, Yost, appears wherever he’s 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t 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.
That corridor is my favorite use of sound in any American film. Those footsteps never let up, and they put me right inside Walker’s head, relentless and a little unhinged, long before he reaches anyone.
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 color organizes the film. A single hue dominates each sequence: greens, then yellows, then greys. That was unusual in 1967 and gives a fractured story a spine the audience can follow without noticing.
Formal experiment justifies itself when it reproduces a character’s mental state. The footsteps aren’t clever, they’re 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. That works only if each departure returns something the present scene needed. Otherwise you’ve 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 doesn’t hold currency. It’s 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’s the film’s joke and its argument. Walker is a nineteenth century figure demanding a physical object from an entity that’s evolved past physical objects, and he’s unstoppable because his demand can’t 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. That 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 hasn’t moved or spoken. It’s the clearest statement the film makes about what he’s become.
That’s the scene I think about most. Dickinson throws everything she has at him and Marvin simply takes it, and his stillness frightens me more than any gunfight the film could have staged.
It Flopped and Then It Did Not
It 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. That’s why the dying dream reading is available at all. Renaming counts for 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. I give it a 9 because it takes the plainest revenge story there is and tells it with the tools of European art cinema, and it never once apologizes for being strange.
The only point I hold back is for a few 1967 optical transitions that look dated next to everything else. Boorman had never made a Hollywood film, and he still made the picture where the American crime film turned subjective.
