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Point blank performance8/26/2023 Cinematographer Philip H Lathrop cut his teeth working with Orson Welles, another denizen of weird Hollywood, and here he conjures dramatic widescreen compositions that at times veer into the avant-garde. What distinguishes Point Blank from other revenge thrillers is its dreamlike, otherworldly tone. Such audacious experimentalism is rare in genre cinema, but it saturates almost every shot. In the script Walker has lines, but Marvin’s performance is so effectively minimal that he knew the scene worked better without them. A dialogue scene follows – though only Lynne speaks. When Walker decides to visit his wife Lynne (who left him for his double-crosser), Boorman cuts between mirror shots of her and the stern-faced Walker pacing down an empty corridor, until his even footsteps form the percussion of a rising crescendo on the soundtrack.Įventually, he bursts into her apartment, fires six bullets into her empty bed, and then takes a seat. Some hard men feel the need to grunt and growl, but so much of Marvin’s menacing power comes from the fact that he doesn’t. Walker is an unsmiling, gravel-voiced antihero who is impossibly tough and, as his name suggests, unstoppable in his single-minded pursuit. It’s a descendent of the seedy cityscape of Raymond Chandler, only more corporate, more anonymous, and more hostile to one man working alone. The Los Angeles he navigates is, in Boorman’s words, “an empty, sterile world”, all bright lights and hard edges that leave nowhere to hide. He vows vengeance but finds that he now must contend with a mysterious corporate hierarchy whose true size and shape he can never quite work out. Lee Marvin plays Walker, a thief who is double-crossed by his partner and left for dead. Such a transnational ping-pong of cultural influences results in a film experience that feels at once familiar and bizarre. As well as the murkier corners of classic film noir, Boorman drew inspiration from art photography and the French New Wave, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which was itself ‘speaking back’ to American crime movies. But British director John Boorman, making his first US production, approaches the material with probing eccentricity. Ostensibly, this hardboiled crime-drama follows a conventional revenge narrative. But perhaps none are as strange and exhilarating as Point Blank. Even 50 years later, many of these films have startling resonance. Young directors were given new independence to embrace the changing attitudes of the decade their films characterised by both formal experimentation and conceptual audacity. Films like Bonnie & Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate signalled the beginning of a new era for major studios.
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