![]() Los Angeles seems more menacingly inhospitable in sunshine than at night, and this irony plays into the film’s dichotomy between the old and new world. Through odd camera angles and stylized compositions that position our hero as powerless and adrift amid this malevolent, foreign metropolis, Boorman creates a tone of uneasy dislocation. ![]() landscape characterized by its sterile, overwhelming enormity-situated in the corners of Boorman’s off-kilter compositions, a colossal architectural or natural edifice weighing down upon his back (if not literally crowding him off the screen), Walker is denied sanctuary. ![]() The action is set against (and within) a sunny corporate L.A. 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. And instead of noir’s typically convoluted narratives involving plenty of unnecessary exposition, Boorman’s film is a model of silent visual storytelling that broke new ground in non-linear cinematic narrative construction. Where noir creates a visual and thematic atmosphere of constriction and imprisonment, Boorman shoots everything in expansive widescreen that posits characters in oppressively open spaces and, when more than one person is on screen, at opposite ends of the frame. Whereas noirs generally boast a shadowy, expressionistic interplay between light and dark, Boorman casts most of his film in brilliant daylight and summery colors. (After the 1965 British comedy Catch Us if You Can, Point Blank was the director’s American film debut.) Influenced by the French New Wave’s radical formal innovations, the European ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, and the genre revisionism of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Boorman set out to make a thriller that looked and felt like nothing else before it, using widescreen Panavision cinematography, explosive colors, and a multi-layered soundtrack to re-envision the noir picture as highbrow Euro-art film. If Walker isn’t interested in the retribution most men would crave after such a betrayal, Boorman is similarly uninterested in merely replicating the style and tone of prototypical film noir. He simply wants what’s rightfully his: the $93,000. A year later, a mysterious informer tells him how to find his wife and Reese, but as Walker makes clear, his motivations aren’t revenge. Left for dead, Walker somehow manages to survive the ambush and, with a stomach full of lead, returns to San Francisco by floating along the treacherous Alcatraz currents on his back. Through a number of lightning-quick, elliptically-assembled shots, we witness Walker, along with best friend Mal Reese (a sniveling and exemplary John Vernon, in his first screen role) and wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) successfully intercept a clandestine money drop-off taking place on Alcatraz when Reese finds that his share of the spoils isn’t satisfactory, he and Lynne plug Walker full of holes in a dank, shadowy prison cell. That quest, as Boorman spells out during Point Blank’s masterful first few moments, involves reclaiming $93,000 that was stolen from him during a heist. Long before Mel Gibson turned the character into an endearing, wise-cracking anti-hero in the pathetic remake Payback, Marvin’s Walker was the cinema’s ultimate unsentimental badass-chillingly determined, unfettered by pesky human emotions like love, sympathy, or remorse, and unwilling to halt the bloodshed until he had fulfilled his quest. 38 pistol at the ready, Marvin’s character seems almost inhuman his one word moniker, Walker, and lack of dialogue for the film’s first 20 minutes merely confirms the impression that he’s less a man than an unbridled, indestructible elemental force. As he stomps stoically and silently amid Los Angeles’s glistening high-rises with an enormous. With daunting broad shoulders, hard, searing eyes, and a face that looked like it had been carved out of iron, Marvin was an imposing goliath, and as he rises from the dead during the title credits of Boorman’s tour de force, one becomes immediately aware of the actor’s enormous physicality. One of Lee Marvin’s initial claims to fame was disfiguring Gloria Grahame’s face with a pot of scalding coffee in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, but even for cinema’s quintessential thug, there was something more terrifyingly callous about his performance in John Boorman’s seminal 1967 neo-noir Point Blank.
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