Point Blank (1967)

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Director: John Boorman

By Roderick Heath

John Boorman, born near the banks of the Thames in Middlesex in 1933, worked his way up to become head of a BBC documentary unit before his 30th birthday. Poised amidst a rising tide of young talents ready to break out of TV work and onto the film scene, Boorman got his chance when offered directorial duties on a film intended as a quick cash-in on the success of the Beatles-starring A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to showcase a rival pop band, the Dave Clark Five. The result, Catch Us If You Can (1965), gained him some attention, but only middling success. Boorman’s career took a hard swerve towards becoming a major Hollywood filmmaker when he encountered Lee Marvin. The towering, famously wild-living, but covertly intelligent and cultured actor was in London shooting The Dirty Dozen (1967). In spite of their diverse origins and experiences, the two men found themselves in close accord, and eventually decided to adapt writer Donald Westlake’s novel The Hunter as their first collaboration. They chose that property because both Marvin and Boorman liked its main character, Parker, who had featured in a string of Westlake’s books published under the regular pen name of Richard Stark. Marvin, who had gained serious clout in Hollywood since his Oscar-winning role in Cat Ballou (1965), declared to Warner Bros. he was handing total control of the project to the sophomore director, presenting both filmmaker and actor a chance to make films completely according to their own instincts. Boorman, who would soon become alternately lauded and derided for his unique, erratic talent, seized the opportunity with both hands. He and Marvin would make two films together, both charged with Boorman’s eccentric vision and Marvin’s desire to explore his own complex and troubled psyche.
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Like his debut, Point Blank again only gained Boorman good reviews and tolerable box office, but it was destined to slowly emerge as the rock-steady base of his reputation amongst cinephiles and an archetype and benchmark for the cinematic adventurousness of the period, all the more interesting and rich for being matched to genre storytelling. In Boorman’s hands, the script, credited to Alexander Jacobs and David and Rafe Newhouse, was transformed into a fractured and hallucinatory experience, the filmmaking’s experimental bent meshing perfectly with a tale exploring mean justice, wintry love, and mysterious politicking. Above and beyond this, Point Blank reveals the director’s fascination with characters on journeys laden with mystical, even mythical overtones, already mooted in jokey fashion on Catch Us If You Can, emerging more fully in a context seemingly far removed from the remote and primal stages of Boorman’s later works like Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972), or The Emerald Forest (1984).
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The genre is film noir, the settings the chitinous environs of 1967 California, where the cyclopean vaults of highways and sweltering reaches of concrete and tar wear occasional flourishes of counterculture colour but more often lurk under the garish hieroglyphs of advertising, and homes have become blank, entrapping boxes of glass and brick. Boorman’s vision of this New World shore, like Richard Lester’s in Petulia (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s on Zabriskie Point (1970), is both dazzled and estranged, surveying vast stretches of prefab housing and modernist infrastructure like cities on the moon. But the overall tone of the film is oneiric, taking as both its key setting and stylistic gambit the environs of Alcatraz Prison, where blocks of rude geometry and twisting, gothic aesthetics are strangely mated, a dank dream heart for Boorman’s American nightmare to well from.
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Marvin plays Walker, a derivation of Parker, renamed for the film with a specific evocation of the man’s relentless movement, as well as to give him a subtle but definite distinctness from Westlake’s creation. He is first glimpsed awakening in the shadowy recesses of an Alcatraz prison cell, trying to remember how he got there. The opening credits come less in the traditional bracketing manner than wound into the film’s discombobulated texture, abstracted against the prison’s metal and stonework whilst the film captures Walker in the act of escaping in spite of terrible wounds, but not in motion, shot like tableaux vivants. The stuttering motion resembles film winding up towards proper speed, and Walker’s spiritual life is tethered to the texture of Boorman’s filmmaking. Slowly, in a skittering flow of images that eventually coalesce into something like traditional scenes, Walker’s memory returns, and with it Point Blank comes together from a miasma into something like a movie.
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Walker recalls his friend Mal Reese (John Vernon), who came begging him for succour in the midst of a frenetic, boozy party: so desperate was Reese that he socked the drunken, garrulous, distracted Walker, knocking him to the floor, and climbed down to shake the dazed man and plead for attention down amongst the jostling feet of the crowd. Reese, a criminal in big with a crime group referred to only as the Organization, has screwed up badly, and the only way he can make up a debt he’s incurred is to rob a mysterious transaction that takes place regularly on Alcatraz during which a helicopter arrives to pick up a load of something in exchange for a big haul of cash. Walker, an old pal of Reese’s, agreed to aid in the plot, but soon Reese, ready to push things to the limit, guns down the two bagmen at the Alcatraz drop-off. This job turned near-fatal for Walker because of two ominously conjoined elements: his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker), third partner in the robbery, was also having an affair with Reese, who realised that the split loot couldn’t cover his debt. So his solution was obvious—he gunned Walker down. Walker is glimpsed during the credits slowly and agonisingly making his way out of the prison and tackling the dangerous swim to the San Francisco shore.
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Boorman cuts to a year later when Walker, recovered, fit, with a cold, hollowed-out glow in his eyes, rides a tourist ferry to the island and converses with an enigmatic man (Keenan Wynn) who seems set on helping Walker exact revenge on Lynne and Reese, who bought his way back into favour and stature in the Organization with the proceeds of the heist, and gives Walker Lynne’s current address, a house high above L.A. Walker zeroes in on Lynne, an approach of fate she senses psychically, not empirically. She prepares like a pharaoh awaiting the angel of death, glimpsed dressing, making up, getting her hair done, all in static, entrapping frames replete with lenses and mirrors, whilst the image (and sound) of Walker on the march through the alien spaces of airports becomes a rhythm of menace and approaching reckoning. Walker thunders into her house and fires his gun into Lynne’s bed on the assumption Reese is in it, but all his bullets do is make smoking holes in the empty mattress, his load shot off impotently.
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Marvin had the inspiration on set to leave out all his own dialogue in the scene that follows, as Lynne robotically explains her own sad and sorry lot since his shooting of being used and discarded by Reese, whilst Walker sits in silent boding, emotions unreadable. Lynne sounds like someone whose nerve and sense of self has been worn out by guilt, still attached to her husband on a psychic level and able to answer his unspoken questions. This shot goes on forever, Boorman turning the frame into a merciless trap that Lynne can only escape through self-destruction. Her explanation, illustrated in more of Boorman’s jagged, contrapuntal flashbacks, depicts her relationship with Walker and Reese with sublime economy: Walker and Lynne’s first meeting (“It was raining…”) a romantic vignette with the younger Walker cockily charming Lynne as she dances about him and a gang of fishermen look; Walker’s reunion with Reese and the burgeoning of his, Lynne, and Reese’s friendship into something like an unspoken ménage-a-trois.
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Walker goes to sleep on her couch and sees his own actions replayed in languorous, analytical slow motion—the strange dance Lynne performed as he burst into the room and silenced her charged with a savage brand of intimacy; the jarring recoil of firing his gun depicted as a self-enervating force emphasised by Marvin’s physical acting, and followed by a dreamy shot of him emptying spent cartridges from his gun like he’s wasted his most vital seed. He awakens and finds Lynne has killed herself with an overdose, her body splayed like a forlorn husk on the sheets of her chic bed. Walker stumbles into her bathroom in a daze and accidentally knocks some of her perfumes and cosmetics into the sink, and stares dazedly into the stuff pooling there, the muck left behind by Lynne’s collapse, all the makings of her beautified façade now a psychedelic stew. Wynn’s mystery man, Walker sees, hovers outside, waiting for the conclusion of this first act in a campaign directed at the Organization.
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Westlake’s Parker was the definition of antihero, a cool, remorseless, virtually amoral career thief whose purpose was to buy himself extended periods of rest at the price of occasional forays into danger and crime in a world defined less by familiar morality than varieties of criminal enterprise. Boorman and Marvin’s Walker is just as hard-bitten and enigmatic, but emerges in the course of the film as a bundle of contradictions. Gifted in violence and detached from both its infliction and reception, he could be ancestor of such later hulking, remorseless bogeymen of screen lore as Halloween’s (1978) Michael Myers or the titular cyborg of The Terminator (1984) when he sees his goal and marches after it with chilly focus. But Marvin, with that scooping nose like a cocked police special and sledgehammer chin poised with grim intent and eyes swivelling slyly under heavy lids, emphasises Walker’s strangely passive, almost bewildered state when he doesn’t have a clear goal in mind or given to him. He’s clearly well removed from the world of organized crime except when pressed by a real motivation, and he even seems rather boyish in glimpses of his younger self flirting with Lynne and when he’s drunk as Reese comes to him for help. There are hints Walker and Reese were once army buddies. Walker’s actual aim isn’t specifically revenge but to get his money, and he seems bewildered when one of his prey doesn’t believe this is his only motive. Hilariously, the sum he’s after is both too big and too small to be easily pried out of the Organization, which represents the criminal enterprise transformed into a modern big business, its fiscal layout all sublimely contained within ledgers.
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Walker buries Lynne in a cemetery perched on a hilltop above suburbs unfolding like lunar colonisation projects where it feels like even the intimacy of burial has become an instant consumer experience. Still with Wynn directing his efforts, Walker starts after Reese, following a breadcrumb trail first to Reese’s fellow middle-level members of the Organization, ‘Big John’ Stegman (Michael Strong), who has a day job as a smarmy car salesman. Walker shakes Stegman up by the novel means of luring him out for a test drive in one of his cars and then turning the car itself into a vehicle of torment, driving it wildly and jerkily until Stegman feels like he’s inside a washing machine. Stegman coughs up one vital piece of information: Reese now has designs on Lynne’s sister Chris (Angie Dickinson), who runs a nightclub called The Picture House that the Organization has taken over. Chris is resisting their efforts to exploit it and Reese’s advances with equal determination. Walker goes to the nightclub in search of her, but is met instead by several Organization goons. This sequence, theoretically a minor action scene, becomes another of Boorman’s fiendishly creative filmic arias, using the nightclub with its high psychedelic-era aesthetic. including pop art swathing the walls and a dynamic soul singer (Stu Gardner, who would later write The Cosby Show’s theme) on stage, as a place where underground nudges normality in surrounds deliberately contrived to resemble the cacophonous modern id with its dialogues of zeitgeists and images. This concept inflects the action on a deadly straight plane, as Walker fights off villains in the wings amidst churning movie projections and thundering noise. But it’s also reflected in a slyer, more blackly humorous way at the same time. The singer gets plump, pasty patrons to join him in screeching lyrics, and the screeches give way to a woman’s scream as she sees the sprawl of pummelled, writhing men left in Walker’s wake, whilst Walker himself lurks in a corner, volcanic cauldrons projected on his face.
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Although as a whole original, Point Blank reveals Boorman, like many young directors stretching their legs, referencing and remixing freely. The themes of corruption and cleansing, fate and chance, describe classic film noir territory, merely translated into an unfamiliar aesthetic. Point Blank was the product of a production template that had fashioned Marvin’s earlier collaboration with Dickinson and director Don Siegel, The Killers (1964). The result can be read as a spiritual sequel to Siegel’s work, albeit moving beyond Siegel’s atavistic but entirely immediate sense of human abnormality into a more overtly surreal and interiorised setting. As Boorman himself noted, one of Point Blank’s funniest scenes reverses a moment in Siegel’s film where Marvin roughs up Dickinson’s character—it’s Dickinson thrashing and beating Marvin, though Walker stops bothering to fight her off and instead stands stoic and unblinking, her fiercest blows bouncing off his chest, squinting at her all the time like one of those dinosaurs whose nervous systems don’t register fatal wounds for minutes. Boorman also trod in the footsteps of Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961): Boorman, like Fuller, surveys crime as an extension of big business, the upper echelons of which have become a sterile zone populated not by bruisers and heavies, but rather by canny plotters and managerial sharks into which a man resurging from the realm of the dead crashes like a wrecking ball. Siegel’s harsh surveys of the prefab cubist wonders of postwar Californian landscapes, long prefigured in the likes of The Line-Up (1958), provide some of Boorman’s palette, much as Boorman’s would inflect Siegel’s on Dirty Harry (1971).
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But Boorman’s more radical efforts here reflect the strong imprint of a more fanciful breed of filmmaker, signalling the young director’s overboiling imagination and ambitions to move well beyond the prescribed limits of genre cinema. The jagged, often dizzyingly perched visuals, themes of interchangeable identity and resurrection, and islets of warped eroticism reference Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as a significant touchstone, particularly apparent in a scene where one character dies falling from a rooftop. Orson Welles’ works surely also loomed in Boorman’s mind, in the obsessively baroque use of shadow and light, the fascination for strange environs and monstrous architecture, interest in power transactions between individuals, and distorted time as both method and motif. The fractured, subjunctive cutting and sound interpolation looks to France and the New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard had actually unofficially adapted one of the Parker novels the year before for Made in U.S.A. (although Godard, with characteristic wit, remade Parker into a lead role for Anna Karina), but Boorman’s approach owed more to Alain Resnais, who had found a way to translate psychological angst and evocation of a tormenting sense of past-in-present into the very texture of filmmaking, with works like Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Muriel (1963). Boorman repurposed his technique for a ghostly survey of the fallout of violence and feeling that seems much less opaque but that becomes, through such manipulation, an equally elusive statement on liminal experience and the slippery nature of character.
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Chris has both great attraction to her sister’s former husband (“The best part of Lynne was you.”) as well as deep internal conflict about it. She’s eventually driven to express that conflict in spectacular fashion, but it’s still not hard for Walker to talk her into helping him when this is added to the balance along with a desire for revenge for Reese’s virtual murder of both Walker and Lynne. Reese has been ordered by his immediate senior in the Organization, Carter (Lloyd Bochner), to hole up in his penthouse apartment under heavy guard in an attempt to bait Walker into an attack. Walker takes the bait, but twists the trap inside out, firstly by using Chris to penetrate the apartment and distract Reese, whilst he creates diversions to distract the guards and enter a neighbouring apartment. Whilst Walker interrogates Reese, he semi-accidentally causes him to stumble back over the railing of his balcony and plunge to the ground far below.
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Boorman’s sense of queasy eroticism crops up constantly throughout the film. Reese’s death comes humiliatingly when he’s naked, after a session in bed with Lynne, who’s actually desperately awaiting Walker to come and get him off her, and falling to his doom leaves his draping towel in Walker’s hand. Later, Boorman mischievously provides a sex scene between Chris and Walker where two men and two women, Walker, Reese, Lynne, Chris, are seen as interchangeable, urged along by seemingly perverse but actually entirely natural urges towards similar ends manifesting in sexual desire, the will to power, the search for an essential state of being. The violence they do to each other becomes the only way their egos can fend off dissolution into one another.

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Boorman would revisit this catalogue of vital motifs in different settings—the city men and rednecks of Deliverance, the immortals and savages in Zardoz, the warring, often magically disguised knights and sorcerers of Excalibur (1981), the dichotomous twins of The Tiger’s Tail (2008). Much like the hunt for the Grail in Excalibur, Walker’s mission has a stated, totemic goal but involves instead an attempt to understand what life is, what it can be, in the face of death. He grazes the edges of such life in Chris’s arms, and their last moments together evoke both their relative anonymity to one another (“What’s my last name?” Chris asks; “What’s my first name?” Walker replies), but also the truth in such bareness, something that also looks forward to the identity-void sexuality of Last Tango in Paris (1972). Simultaneously, thanks to Wynn’s mysterious sensei, Walker is set on the path to ruthless, methodical exposure of the food chain of the quasi-corporate mob, trying to find a beating heart somewhere that he can attack, and discovering, eventually, there isn’t one, only a shifting series of actors whose attempts to grasp the big brass ring set in motion their own downfall. Carter hires a pipe-smoking assassin (James B. Sikking) to take care of Walker and gets Stegman to be the bait, but Walker senses treachery in any meeting arranged by the Organization. He barges into Carter’s office, drags him out, and forces him to be the one who ventures into the assassin’s field of fire.
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This sequence, set in the Los Angeles River, is both a beautiful piece of staging, with Boorman utilising the vistas of the setting and the human architecture of his actors in alternations of grandeur and diminution, and also a vital nexus of references. Boorman locates the same discomfort in the locale Gordon Douglas exploited for scifi-accented ends in Them! (1954), that myth of atom-age horror, whilst the mechanics of the scene reference the similar punishment-by-substitution in a hard classic of noir, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946): the psychic precincts of two disparate genres combined to describe the new age. The assassin does Walker the neat service of killing both Stegman and Carter (in fact, Walker, for all his potent gestures and aura, doesn’t kill anyone in the film), and so Walker has to move another step up the Organization’s food chain to Brewster (Carroll O’Connor), a fatuous executive whose house Walker and Chris occupy at Wynn’s direction. Brewster, arriving in town in a private jet, shrugs off Sikking’s assassin when he wants to be paid for his perfectly executed killing of the wrong target, and instead suggests he go talk to another of the Organization’s bosses, Fairfax, or better yet, kill him, too. Walker is able to capture Brewster once he arrives home, and he nervously, but honestly explains to Walker the basic problem: the Organization barely works with cash anymore. The only option open to him to obtain what he seeks forces him to (nearly) return to the setting that put him on this path, the money drop in San Francisco, which has been shifted from Alcatraz to the Presidio.
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This sequence provides the last, most beguiling, but also inscrutable stage in Walker’s journey, as it proves not to be the culmination of his efforts, but those of Wynn, who is revealed to be the last, hitherto unseen Fairfax. He has engineered the whole business because his underlings were planning to unseat him and has the assassin gun down Brewster to set the seal on the business. Fairfax then call for Walker to come out and take his pay, but Walker remains hovering in the shadows until the assassin emerges, whilst Fairfax becomes increasingly angry, shouting out, “I pay my debts!” But Walker has learnt a lesson, and he retreats into the darkness. Boorman scans Brewster’s dead, splayed body on the bricks of the Presidio, from high above, pulls back and scans the San Francisco vista before zooming in again on Alcatraz, as if closing the loop on a circle.
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Some have seen this shot as proof that Walker died, and that all we’ve seen is simply his dying fantasy turning into desperate existential surrender. But to me, Point Blank is ultimately not reducible to such a literal resolution. What is certain is that Walker, at the end, sees his mission as fruitless, the final prize illusory and doomed to lead him into the same trap he stepped into before. He will remain a ghost haunting the underworld, literally or not. Boorman felt that for Marvin, who had been badly wounded in his gruelling WWII service and carried both physical and figurative scars throughout his life, Walker became the vessel of his angst, and so Point Blank is both an oblique investigation of his experience and its most specific exploration. It’s a statement purely dedicated to exploring that strange state of being, at once dead and alive, cold and loving, perpetually afraid and entirely justified, empty of knowledge and gifted with wisdom.