point of no return

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) is a tense, eerie crime thriller that serves as a groundbreaking and definitive late 1960s study in existentialism and alienation. It’s so coldly intense as to be nearly unnerving, and yet so experimentally bold and visually beautiful as to be alluringly attractive. The film plays like the surreal fragments of a nihilistic nightmare, to the point where we don’t know what’s real and what’s a dream, what’s literally physical and what represents the psychological mind. Indeed, this movie even carries a strong implication of the ambiguously metaphysical. Young British director John Boorman (b. 1933), clearly influenced by the innovations of the French New Wave, daringly renders time elliptical and circular through a series of elegantly jagged and compulsive flash-backs and flash-forwards. Point Blank thus becomes a swirling mindscape, its rhythms the manifestation of a human brain that will race through the past, present, and future in interwoven patterns, irrespective of the external world’s harsh temporal linearity. Just as impressive is Boorman’s rich sense of color, which he tailors to monotonous modern landscapes, the kind that hint at a robotic, mechanical universe. The dominant color tones of Boorman’s mise-en-scene change markedly from sequence to sequence, forming a shifty kaleidoscope that becomes a metaphor for capricious and elusive morality. The old black-and-white, wrong-or-right standards of a past society have become lost, awash in an ever-changing sea of mercurial color. Even the clothes of the characters change in accordance with the scenery, indicating that everyone is a chameleon and that no one is above suspicion. Boorman’s daunting long shots, along with his emphasis upon sound and form in editing, also help to make for a cinematic tour-de-force.

Sometime in his violent past, Lee Marvin’s towering, coolly intimidating Walker has been double-crossed out of $93,000. Now he’s determined to retrieve his money and run over anyone and anything that’s in his way until he uncovers the problem’s root and recovers the lost loot. His quest is mercenary and narcissistic, concerned with nothing but his own self-interest, and yet paradoxically, it’s also a source of ethics and honor. Walker is a nihilistic anti-hero, and his manner of behavior is brutish, relentless, and implacable. He’s a man who doesn’t compromise and reflects no conscience, less of a character and more of a ghostly specter haunting the narrative, an elemental force of vengeance. That driving force of vengeance is pure, however, and it thus makes Walker’s nihilism pure. He may be outrageous, virtually psychotic, and remote to the point of saturnine coldness, but he’s somehow human rather than robotic. He’s a displaced soul, a man searching for the soul that has left his body, vulnerable and yet detached from that vulnerability, a dead man walking. While not a character that audiences can warm to, the anti-hero Walker nonetheless emerges as an ironically sympathetic persona. To quote film scholar Andrew Tudor on page 56 of The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1998), “The movie creates a paradox in which this unlovely figure comes to represent a more human spirit than that embodied in the syndicate’s bureaucratic order.” Indeed, what Walker discovers as he violently moves from duplicitous person to duplicitous person is that he’s an individual in a world that has been lost to mechanical bureaucracy. Walker keeps expecting to peel off layer after layer until he reaches a core, a person who’s responsible and accountable for the money and has the moral authority to pay him off. Or, to put it another way, Walker expects to move up a vertical chain of command until he finds the real boss, the real adversary that he needs to confront. Instead, all Walker finds is a horizontal line of suites, middlemen, empty executives, and criminal calculators that don’t lead up anywhere. None of them reflect any responsibility or accountability, and none of them possess any moral authority. They’re interchangeable, worthless, and individually irrelevant, the petty pawns of an inhuman force. In effect, Walker’s reckless violence and vengeance appear immaculate, righteous, and noble in the face of nihilistic corporatism, the sordid and corrupt monstrosity of a numbingly modernistic age. Hence the film’s colors change almost wantonly, indicating an alienating world with no moral center or gravity, individualism and constancy having been obliterated by fickle bureaucracy. Elusively maneuvering and reappearing like a spook through a wilderness of mirrors, Walker becomes an existential figure, merely having to exist in order to prove his point. Ultimately, though, his point may indeed be blank, for while he may score a narrow victory at the end, it’s undoubtedly hollow, an inconsequential battle in a lost war. After all, what good is the potential recovery of the money in the face of a corporate society that has abolished responsibility and absolved accountability, the values that Walker silently holds dear? To again quote Tudor, “Sharing his perspective as we do, we are left with a pervasive sense of impotence in the face of larger impersonal forces.”

Lee Marvin rose through the movie ranks by playing small, colorful characters in violent film genres, especially Westerns. In those Westerns, Marvin, even as a villain, could always fight man-to-man, with such personal combat invariably constituting the crux of the matter. In Point Blank, Marvin’s Walker finds that man-to-man combat is desultory and meaningless, because the men themselves are irrelevant. The real enemy, as the film and Tudor suggest, is impersonal, something that will not fight and cannot be fought. As in Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) a few years later, all that’s left for the embittered anti-hero is resignation, an empty physical victory and then a retreat into the shadows of a decaying America, a system run amuck. While its colorful, surreal, and nearly psychedelic milieu represents its sixties moment, Point Blank also proves to be one of the epochal films that points the way towards the grim and gray 1970s.

Boorman directs this terse movie at a crisp pace, and the fascinating editing and cinematography hold the viewer’s attention, as does Marvin’s iconic, laconic performance, at once overpowering and mysteriously withheld. Angie Dickinson aids him as Walker’s sister-in-law, her cutely gorgeous face belying the feline ferocity of her spirit. Her cat-and-mouse game with Walker, and the violent sexual angst that they display towards one another, sears the consciousness. In fact, the whole film pulses under a cloud of sex-and-violence, as when Dickinson’s character sensually beds another man to allow Walker an opportunity for brutality. Violence looms constantly in Point Blank, occasionally exploding with rupturing force, usually from Walker himself. Colorful supporting work is turned in from John Vernon, Carroll O’Connor, and Keenan Wynn, among others, as smarmy players in this seedy, shadowy, and ultimately depressing whirlpool. Also of note is Johnny Mandel’s aurally haunting score, the perfect counterpoint to an experimental, ambiguous, and utterly unmitigated film. Indeed, Point Blank reminds us of a time when Hollywood would sometimes refuse to pull its punches.