The most famous sequence in this film is Walker (Lee Marvin) striding down an empty airport corridor, inter-cut with the morning routine of the wife (Sharon Acker) who betrayed him and let her lover (John Vernon) shoot him and leave him for dead. The set-up promises a bloody payoff in which the two no-goodnicks get theirs . . .
And indeed Walker bursts into the woman's apartment, silences her roughly, and empties his Big Gun into . . . an empty bed. The lover has deserted her (he sends a monthly pay-off), she dreams of suicide, and we realize that this supposed femme fatale is just a sad, weak woman who knows she did something terrible and has been paying the psychological price ever since.
And so begins a pattern; Walker works his way up the leadership chain of the crime family, and none of the men he encounters, and whose deaths he is indirectly responsible for (he doesn't actually kill anybody) can pay him back the $93,000 he wants, or give him back what he really wants, those few brief months of happiness with his wife before the snake oozed into their wrong-side-of-the-law Garden of Eden.
The screenplay is adapted from "The Hunter," which was written by Donald Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. 'Adapted' is the key word, because the original book is an icy pulp-novel blood-bath where the main character, Parker, really isn't interested in anything but the money he's owed and casually kills anybody and everybody who gets in his way. (The book is interesting mostly as a stylistic exercise, personally, it left me with a major case of The Creeps.) This is a crime story that is really a mood piece about loneliness and missed connections and bad karma. The acting is incredible; not just Marvin as the despondent Walker, but Angie Dickinson as his sister-in-law who has heartbreaks of her own, and John Vernon, Michael Strong, Lloyd Bochner, and Carroll O'Connor as the slick, empty men he destroys. Sharon Acker is absolutely heart-breaking as his betraying wife, even though she's really on-screen for maybe 10 minutes tops, and Keenan Wynn takes a role with little substance and fills it with a commanding, unsettling presence.
A lot of talent behind the camera as well; Phillip Lathrop's photography has a mesmerizing chill to it, using the Panavision screen to create empty spaces that unnerve the audience (setting the film in Los Angeles also helps, even with all of the skyscrapers, it's still a suburb in search of a city). Johnny Mandel's music is both eerie and mournful, and the sets not only use color for psychological purposes, but find the formal beauty in even the most vulgar of settings.
Behind all of this ultimately, of course, is director John Boorman, who had already made the underrated comedy/drama CATCH US IF YOU CAN (shown here as HAVING A WILD WEEKEND), which could have been just a silly vehicle for The Dave Clark Five but, thanks to Boorman's direction, Peter Nichols' script, and the performances of the cast (including Dave Clark), remains one of those "60's movies" that behaved the way that films of the era were supposed to, asking unsettling questions about life and not always providing pat answers. POINT BLANK is also a genre film that is ultimately something more than that. Uncommon enough then, and kind of hard to imagine being made at all these days . . .
And indeed Walker bursts into the woman's apartment, silences her roughly, and empties his Big Gun into . . . an empty bed. The lover has deserted her (he sends a monthly pay-off), she dreams of suicide, and we realize that this supposed femme fatale is just a sad, weak woman who knows she did something terrible and has been paying the psychological price ever since.
And so begins a pattern; Walker works his way up the leadership chain of the crime family, and none of the men he encounters, and whose deaths he is indirectly responsible for (he doesn't actually kill anybody) can pay him back the $93,000 he wants, or give him back what he really wants, those few brief months of happiness with his wife before the snake oozed into their wrong-side-of-the-law Garden of Eden.
The screenplay is adapted from "The Hunter," which was written by Donald Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. 'Adapted' is the key word, because the original book is an icy pulp-novel blood-bath where the main character, Parker, really isn't interested in anything but the money he's owed and casually kills anybody and everybody who gets in his way. (The book is interesting mostly as a stylistic exercise, personally, it left me with a major case of The Creeps.) This is a crime story that is really a mood piece about loneliness and missed connections and bad karma. The acting is incredible; not just Marvin as the despondent Walker, but Angie Dickinson as his sister-in-law who has heartbreaks of her own, and John Vernon, Michael Strong, Lloyd Bochner, and Carroll O'Connor as the slick, empty men he destroys. Sharon Acker is absolutely heart-breaking as his betraying wife, even though she's really on-screen for maybe 10 minutes tops, and Keenan Wynn takes a role with little substance and fills it with a commanding, unsettling presence.
A lot of talent behind the camera as well; Phillip Lathrop's photography has a mesmerizing chill to it, using the Panavision screen to create empty spaces that unnerve the audience (setting the film in Los Angeles also helps, even with all of the skyscrapers, it's still a suburb in search of a city). Johnny Mandel's music is both eerie and mournful, and the sets not only use color for psychological purposes, but find the formal beauty in even the most vulgar of settings.
Behind all of this ultimately, of course, is director John Boorman, who had already made the underrated comedy/drama CATCH US IF YOU CAN (shown here as HAVING A WILD WEEKEND), which could have been just a silly vehicle for The Dave Clark Five but, thanks to Boorman's direction, Peter Nichols' script, and the performances of the cast (including Dave Clark), remains one of those "60's movies" that behaved the way that films of the era were supposed to, asking unsettling questions about life and not always providing pat answers. POINT BLANK is also a genre film that is ultimately something more than that. Uncommon enough then, and kind of hard to imagine being made at all these days . . .