★★★★★ 5
Fractured pop art masterpiece
Walker (Lee Marvin) and Mal Reese (John Vernon) stage a robbery, stealing a bag of cash from some crooks conducting a delivery by helicopter in deserted Alcatraz. Reese double crosses Walker and leaves him for dead, taking off with the cash and Walker's wife. Walker survives, escapes from the island, and comes after Reese, and all the rest of his criminal organisation, with the mantra, "I want my $93,000."
On this third or fourth viewing, I was struck less by what an exemplary action film this is (Marvin, the hardest man in the history of the movies, was at least as mean and relentless in The Killers), and more by how deeply artiness is infused into its structure and design. The recurrent flashing back and forward in time, especially at the start between the planning - not in the traditional meticulous heist film set up, just a series of fractured, barely linked brief meetings and conversations - and the robbery, but also Walker's thoughts returning to his betrayal, feed the predominant critical interpretation that Walker was fatally wounded on Alcatraz, and the whole film is his trying to process this and his fantasy of revenge. Boorman addresses this directly in the commentary, to the extent that he refuses to commit and says it's intended to be ambiguous. I'm now firmly in the dying-flashback camp, because of Walker's almost magical powers. (On reflection, it's like the question of whether Deckard is a replicant - you can enjoy debating it and looking for clues, but in the end the answer is yes.) He appears in new scenes and locations with no evidence of having travelled, and generally in a spiffy new outfit (more of this later) despite carrying nothing but his revolver, and, particularly in the central sequence, he evades being apprehended either by coincidence (the lift he's in opens and closes while the baddies waiting for the same lift are distracted by a commotion) or by the sheer application of cool (waiting immobile but scarcely invisible in an underground car park while his pursuer is gunned down by police). He also has an advisor/mentor, played by Keenan Wynn, who pops up in scenes like a cartoon character (he looks like a sort of dome shaped, bristle headed man in a suit who might appear in Ren and Stimpy) and gives Walker his next mission, while the two of them assiduously avoid eye contact as if one or both aren't really there.
From Walker's re-emergence in the first of a series of natty suits, Point Blank is constructed as a series of set pieces. The first is the oddest, continuing the flashbacks and playing with chronology. Walker is seen striding intently down a corridor, and we hear the sound of his footsteps over a series of scenes of his meeting his wife, and the two of them sharing innocent good times with Reese. He confronts his wife, fires six shots into her bed before realising Reese isn't there. A scene later, she's dead after an apparent overdose. A scene after that, the body is gone, the apartment is bare, and Walker has boarded himself inside. Did Walker even see his wife? Had she died already? A messenger arrives from whom Walker extracts a name, and he's off chasing the next link.
Walker meets care dealer Big John, whose yard has enormous signs in a jazzy '50s font. He asks for a test drive, buckles his seatbelt, and smashes the car between pillars (c.f. The Driver) until John spills the next name.
The most self-consciously art-directed scene follows, in which Walker visits a nightclub which features both a bikini-clad go-go dancer and a trio playing something between jazz and James Brown. Tipped off by a flirtatious waitress that he's being followed, he ducks behind the stage, and fights two baddies while giant faces are projected on a huge screen behind him. In a moment that suggests Tarantino watched this while writing Inglourious Basterds, Walker pulls down a rack of celluloid canisters to trap one pursuer, and then returns things to some kind of action movie orthodoxy by subduing the other one with a haymaker to the groin.
In the centrepiece, Walker meets his sister-in-law Chris (Angie Dickinson). Grief and his mission of revenge don't mean he misses the chance to share her bed, and emerge, manhood serenely unthreatened, in her borrowed yellow shortie robe. The colour scheme gets turned up to 11 at this stage, with Walker in a mustard shirt-sports jacket combo (his outfits get truly creative whenever he's bedded Angie - later, he sports a shirt somewhere between salmon and ruby grapefruit - which I guess is the wardrobe equivalent of Joseph Gordon Levitt's post-coital dance routine in (500) Days of Summer), Angie in a rockin' yellow shift dress and matching '60s mid-length coat (let down soon after by wearing something striped like a bee), and Reese in a light tan, crushed velour t-shirt that might be the least flattering male garment in cinema until Borat's mankini. Walker even finds a sightseeing telescope painted lemon yellow, which he casually dislocates from its moorings to scope out Reese's penthouse lair.
Once Reese is dealt with, the movie shifts into an early example of crime-as-big-business. Reese's boss is Carter, whose sleek Mad Men-style office and threads are matched by his resemblance to that series' Ted. According to IMDb, Lloyd Bochner, who plays Carter, was doing voice-over work from age eleven, and between him, Vernon's baritone (you know how it sounds - like Dean Wormer: "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."), and Marvin's basso profundo, there's a meeting of male voices unmatched until, say, Brideshead Revisited.
Around this point the architecture of LA attracts more and more focus, both modernist glass towers and the concrete culvert of the LA River, where a sniper lurks who might have inspired the climactic shooter in Get Carter.
The commentary is conducted as a dialogue between Boorman and Soderbergh, who, if you've seen this, early Nic Roeg (Performance and Don't Look Now), and were already acquainted with the colour yellow, seems less original than he otherwise might. He has the decency to open by talking about how many times he's stolen from Point Blank.
He's not the only one though. Point Blank deconstructs and toys with the action film as knowingly as anything in the 45+ years since, up to and including Archer and the entire oeuvre of Shane Black. Just when it's in danger of becoming too clever to be satisfying as a genre piece, it gets your attention with a pistol whipping, a punch to the groin, or the rarely-shown actual end result of the villain-takes-a-long-fall thing. And of course there's Marvin, who, whether dressed like a dandy, wearing a robe, or looking baffled when the next corporate criminal explains that they just don't have $93,000 to hand over, can't be beat. Seriously, you're not obliged to love it, but you have to see it at least once.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2014
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