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Initially dismissed by critics as brutal and nihilistic, Point Blank (1967) has come to be recognized as an innovative, uncompromising thriller that presaged the rise of the antihero in American cinema. Veteran screen tough guy Lee Marvin is perfectly cast as the career criminal who, leaving jail two years after being betrayed by wife Angie Dickinson and shot by mobster John Vernon in a double cross, doggedly pursues them to regain stolen loot and get revenge in the process. Based on the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake's pseudonym), Point Blank was the first Hollywood film directed by John Boorman (Deliverance), who employed flashbacks, flash forwards, and repeated action scenes in an effort to keep viewers off guard throughout. He succeeded admirably: While unmistakably a product of its times -- some sequences border on the psychedelic -- Boorman's film employed narrative techniques and popularized character types that influenced filmmakers for years to come. It's immeasurably superior to Mel Gibson's 1999 remake, Payback, which is far more lavishly mounted but not nearly as effective. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. Lucia Bozzola

Product Details

• UPC: 012569674141
• Source: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Editions: Subtitled, Dubbed
• Time: 1:32:00
• Sales Rank: 17,619

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