SPOILERS
I posted this elsewhere, but it plays into this thread:
[Porter shoots a hole in Fairfax's suitcase]
Fairfax: Hey. What the hell are you doing, man? This is...
Bronson: [on speakerphone] Fairfax? Fairfax.
Fairfax: No, no, it's all right, he's just killing my alligator bags and shooting holes in my suits. Man, that's just MEAN. That's MEAN, man.
Fairfax: What are you doing this for, man? Is it the principle of the thing?
Porter: Stop it, I'm getting misty.
[starts to walk out]
Porter: And tell him it's $70,000!
Fairfax: $70,000? Hell, my suits are worth more than that!
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That's some dialogue from late in "Payback"(1999) Mel Gibson is Porter; James Coburn is upper mid-level gangster boss Fairfax and Kris Kristofferson(offscreen) is Bronson.
Gibson is confronting Coburn as the latter returns from a business trip, along with a coupla bodyguards who Gibson "neutralizes'(they have to hold onto Coburn's heavy alligator bags.)
Its a funny scene. Gibson is expertly tough and can-do; Kristofferson is a bit nervous on the speaker phone because the last guy Gibson threatened to kill if Kristofferson didn't pay up ..William Devane's lower-down gangster manager ... he did.
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Way back in 1967, the original version of "Payback" was released. It was called "Point Blank," and the scene above was roughly the same, except Lee Marvin, in the Gibson role, was called "Walker," and Carroll O'Connor, in the James Coburn role, was called "Brewster." There was a "Fairfax" in "Point Blank," but he was the "next man up the chain." But Marvin and O'Connor didn't exhange all those one-liners. It was simple, basic plot talk.
The Lee Marvin/Carroll O'Connor scene has Marvin threatening to shoot O'Connor, to an offscreen and unidentified "boss." Ultimately, Marvin only fires his gun to SCARE O'Connor.
In "Payback," these parts of the Marvin/O'Connor scene were moved earlier in the movie and transferred to the verbal confrontation between Gibson and William Devane..and Gibson DID kill Devane when his offscreen boss refused to pay the money.
Now, William Devane was called "Carter" in "Payback," and "Point Blank" had a Carter, too -- played by Lloyd Bochner, with many of Devane's lines but an entirely different fatal fate -- Lee Marvin sends Bochner to his death via a set-up assassination planned for MARVIN.
Confused yet?
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Its a funny thing about "Payback," which was a formal remake of "Point Blank." Certain character names were kept -- Carter, Fairfax, Stegman -- but given to different characters, or different scenes from "Point Blank" were assigned to different characters in "Payback."
Still, the gist of the story is the same: a badass "returns from the dead" to fight and kill his way up a gangster chain of command in demand of a rather small sum of money. (Odd, it was only $93,000 in "Point Blank" and considered too small; over 30 years later, with inflation, it was only $70,000 in "Payback.")
Educated film critic types vastly prefer the original "Point Blank" of '67 to "Payback," of '99, perhaps all the moreso since "Payback" went through a edit job from "director's cut" to theatrical and hence we don't see to have an "agreed upon" version of "Payback."
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What's funny is this: "Payback," the new one, is filled with great verbal jousts between Mel Gibson and the great actors selected to play his enemies(Devane, Coburn, an especialy oily --- and Kris Kristofferson.) Whereas way back in "Point Blank," badass Lee Marvin barely said a thing, and HIS dialogue with the other gangsters was perfunctory, basic, with little wit or payoff.
Well, 1967 was a different time. Movies WERE simpler back then, plots were more basic. To the extent that "Point Blank" is more disjointed than "Payback" it is not in the plot -- that's easy enough to follow -- but rather in director John Boorman's intense attempt to bring the stylistic techiques of the European art film --- flashcuts, flashbacks, flashforwards -- into the American studio film.
There's a problem in trying to "go back." If you are familiar with "Payback" and all the one-liners and action sequences and 1999 polished production values, "Point Blank" ends up looking too simple, too non-verbal, somewhat primitive. That was then, and this is now (and now, "Payback" is 11 years old as I post this...time marches on, and the movies are a terrible marker of how quickly that happens.)
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The main event: Mel Gibson versus Lee Marvin as a badass.
On merit, NOBODY's gonna beat Lee Marvin as a badass. To be a badass in "Point Blank," all Lee Marvin had to do was be there, to exist. Marvin had seen WWII combat and had been a drinker and brawler in Hollywood for years. He WAS a badass. He also became a star almost precisely as his hair turned gray and he could project a certain mature manliness.
Mel Gibson was a big, big star by the time he made "Payback," easily the box office equivalent of Lee Marvin circa '67. Still, Gibson had been a "pretty face" in his youth, and had some romances and light dramas in his screen past(Bird on a Wire, Mrs. Soffel.) Even Gibson's superfit fighter cop in the "Lethal Weapons" had long hair and a penchant for Three Stooges goofiness.
What was great in "Payback" was watching Gibson BECOME a badass, taking Lee Marvin lessons, if you will, and "playing the part" well. That his pretty face had well aged into the forehead furrows and lines of older age only helped him sell the toughness. Gibson had to work at it harder than Lee Marvin, but he matched him.
So, I'll take the chicken way out: "Point Blank" is not better than "Payback," nor vice versa.
They're different, but both great in different ways.
Still, "Point Blank" was there first, and stands as a small landmark in "Eurofilm meets American studio" film history.
Maybe we should respect it just a BIT more...
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balthazar_bee
11 years ago
It's nice to see there are others who enjoy Payback on its own terms. It's no Point Blank, but, like ecarle, I'm going to refrain from deriding Payback for the sake of praising Point Blank.
I really, really enjoy them both, but to me the story becomes still more complicated with the eventual release of Brian Helgeland's "director's cut" of Payback (or "Straight Up", as the cover states, Gibson holding his gun sideways in some studio exec's idea of badassery).
As ecarle has said, Gibson successfully transformed himself into a hard guy for Payback. This was apparent in the theatrical version of the film, even with its quips and the presence of a bandaged dog in the final scene.
Helgeland had already proven himself quite a capable screenwriter/adapter with L.A. Confidential -- and the pulpy quality of Ellroy's work probably owes more than a little to "Richard Stark's" Parker novels, which are about as raw as pre-Ellroy tough guy novels get. When I read that the film was taken away from him by Gibson's production company for -- there's no nice way to say this -- post-production meddling, I remember thinking, "Since I liked the tampered-with version, I'm sure I'll love the original cut! Shame we'll never get to see it."
But then Gibson did something kind of wonderful: He saw to it that Hegeland's version saw the light of day. Why?
Who knows.
He really didn't have anything to gain -- he had to figure that most people would say that the film was fine (if not better) in its original form, and that he'd become a cliché: big Hollywood producer and superstar who can trample the cinematic vision of others by sheer force of will.
Now, if anything, Payback "Straight Up" is far closer to Point Blank than the theatrical cut is. Many of the quips are gone. Kristofferson doesn't get to say his evergreen "You just dug your own grave." He's not even in the movie anymore -- replaced by Angie Dickinson's voice over a speaker phone (although I believe the DVD/blu-ray version replaces her with someone else). The wonderfully moody blues have been ditched in favour of a look that's far more natural. It's a period film again, rather than being a weird hybrid, since Gibson's reshoots were obviously contemporary (no money for period detail!). The "piggy" torture scene is gone. The snarling voice over is gone -- as is the marvelous opening scene in which the slimiest of slimy on-screen doctors removes bullets from Gibson's back.
But we do get a scene of Gibson and Deborah Kara Unger laying into one another. It's pretty shocking -- probably the best indication that "this isn't your daddy's Payback". Compared to Angie Dickinson belting Lee Marvin, certainly brutal enough, this is simply ferocious.
And, of course, the ending is far more ambiguous. No guarantee of survival, no bandaged dog, no big explosion taking out Bronson.
On paper, I would've thought these changes would've helped the film, making it something tougher, closer to "Stark's" novel and Boorman's terrific Point Blank.
But I don't know. When I watch "Straight Up", I find myself missing the oppressive blues, the voice over, the tougher-than-we've-seen-but-still-present Gibson charm, the original score (which for some reason is replaced with a serviceable but less memorable one -- apparently the workprint used temp tracks from Dirty Harry, which I'd love to see) and the almost humourous sadism and brutality of the theatrical version.
"Straight Up", in short, feels rather bland when compared to either Point Blank's surreal purposefulness or Payback '99's playfulness. If only every meddling producer had Gibson's cinematic savvy.
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