The Violent Psychedelic NeoNoir Masterpiece: LEE MARVIN in POINT BLANK (1967)
All these decades later this ruthless, hallucinogenic and violent film is still being argued about. I say it's bad ass, watch it here and decide! Did I mention Angie Dickinson?
Click this underlined link to watch POINT BLANK
Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson star in this 1957 full episode of M Squad from the first season, titled "Diamond Hard". Angie Dickinson would star with Lee Marvin ten years later in the classic crime thriller Point Blank.
M Squad was, like The Untouchables, taken off the air for violence after a request from a concerned President LBJ. But at the bottom of the list of shows which were feared to have too much violence, was news reports from battles in Vietnam. Which was what he really wanted taken off TV and for several years he got his wish. The shows were just the scapegoat.
POINT BLANK has so many myths about it and the relationship between Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin that I was happy to see the myths erased with this documentary about the film:
POINT BLANK has not dated at all. It truly is a timeless thriller. Albeit a disorienting, psychedelic one. The Guardian review had this to say:
Lee Marvin is Walker, the robber shot and left for dead by his criminal associates in the eerily deserted precincts of Alcatraz prison, where they had been planning to steal mob cash being secretly transported there by helicopter. After his miraculous and in fact superhuman recovery and escape, Walker plans to get back at the guy who ran off with his loot and his wife; this man is now part of the shadowy "Organisation" – a very 60s setup – and Walker becomes involved with his wife's beautiful, troubled sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson). It is a movie about memory: a gunshot is always liable to trigger the memory of previous violence, the trauma lurks nearby, at point-blank range, part of a skein of remembered bloodshed extending backwards as the revenge plot pushes forwards. An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.
If you think this description means it would inspire the great thriller MEMENTO you are correct. POINT BLANK captures a year that saw Hollywood pushing boundaries. THE GRADUATE, THE DIRTY DOZEN and BONNIE AND CLYDE all came out in 1967 and all were game changers. This is from the website HIGH ON FILMS which has good reviews even if it points out films that are good to get high to. I live in a state with legal recreational marijuana and that’s all I’m saying!
The pleasures of watching Point Blank rests in the way Boorman constructs this amoral, nihilistic universe, where the uber-cool exteriors of the affluent capitalist society couldn’t always masquerade the individuals’ existential malaise. Adorned with explosive colors, recalling Euro-art cinema, Boorman unravels the pointlessness of the scheme, carried out by a man who is neither dead nor actually living.
The extraordinary quotient of Point Blank lies in its digressions and its unnerving tone of discontinuity. Although the film maintains the classic film-noir mood of bleak fatalism, the sinister shadows and darkness are replaced here with the sunny, sterile corporatescape of L.A. There’s a joy in watching our powerless, adrift protagonist taking on these suited, powerful corporate-types, snugly positioned inside the colossal buildings. As the narrative progresses, the familiar double-crossing ‘friend’ is replaced by different entities of a nefarious, faceless ‘organization’. They are not simple-minded crooks, for whom $93,000 isn’t much money. At the same time, the multiple-heads of conglomerate monster exists for the sake of increasing profit that they can’t actually give away the money. This paradox is as comically absurd as Walker’s quest.
Watch POINT BLANK by clicking here
Behind the paywall: A sequel of sorts to POINT BLANK starring Sydney Poitier and actually preferred by Tarantino. THE ORGANIZATION from 1971. I disagree but- I do like this movie.
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