Point Blank: A Dream of Full-Color Noir

Walker pauses in the vacant aftermath of this strange, oneiric episode. There’s lots of other stuff and people he’ll have to smash up in pursuit of his dough, and this will lead him ultimately not to smashing but to putting a dent in “the Organization.” Unnamed or perhaps named in the same generic way as Walker himself, the Organization suggests that America is, in David Thomson’s phrase, “a complex of organized crime,” but it would be a mistake to think of Marvin as some kind of avenging fallen angel trying to tear down the corrupt and complex edifice of American capitalism. He wants his money.

So on he goes, violently biting his way up the fiduciary food chain, dressed casually only in flashback, back in his early days with Lynne, before she started leaning toward Mal, or when they were doing the Alcatraz heist, but this simple claim is a little hard to sustain since everything from that point on might be a flashback from the moment of his dying, when a movie-dream of impeccably dressed vengeance floats through his head. The suits and sports coats he sports for the rest of the movie are not the best clothes for fighting, especially from a contemporary perspective of hoodies and trainers, but as Boorman explained, Marvin’s clothes were “severely tailored to allow no wrinkle or ruck—they were armor.” There’s no excess cloth on the suits, and after Marvin had contrived to give the novice director the boon of final approval on everything, Boorman shored up this position of extraordinary freedom by shooting a minimum of footage so that even if the studio did try to recut his movie they’d have little filmic cloth to play with. The bond between director and star was tight.

In the catalog to the exhibition of William Eggleston’s photographs that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, John Szarkowski wrote of how Eggleston had “learned to see in color.” Point Blank was Boorman’s first experience of shooting in color, but to say he was a quick learner is to understate his precocity. Not only did he become instantly fluent in this new language, he developed a grammar of cinematic color as advanced as Antonioni’s in Red Desert or Blow-Up. The clothes, along with everything else—furniture, curtains, cars, sky—are color coordinated, each scene having its particular color harmony, from the silver grays of the early scenes at Lynne’s place to deep blues at the car lot, and on to yellows and browns at Huntley House, where Angie Dickinson (Chris, a seductive Trojan horse) agrees to yield to Mal’s advances. But—and this is essential—there is nothing schematic about this color scheme. It looks so natural that you barely notice it—you notice and respond to the colors, of course, without that response being resisted and therefore diminished by consciousness of directorial insistence. This is all the more remarkable given that all the needs of plot and story—including locations—are subordinated to the film’s aesthetic and rhythm (which, as that walkway sequence makes clear, are inextricably linked). That might be why, watching Point Blank on TV as a seventeen-year-old, I first became dimly—unconsciously, even—aware that there might be more to a movie than what was happening to the people on-screen. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the film never seems overstylized. Why? Because there’s nothing inessential in Boorman’s vision. Devoid of all twists and turns, so little remains of the plot that it can be powered by the director’s saturated aesthetic, a dream of full-color noir.

Devoid of irony and knowingness, it’s also unexpectedly funny. In addition to the Pinteresque dialogue, we have Carroll O’Connor (later to find fame as Archie Bunker in All in the Family) telling Walker—after he’s walloped someone in the kisser with a .44 Magnum—that he’s a very bad man, asking why he’s running around doing things like this. The night before, in that same house up in Curson Canyon, Angie Dickinson (who compels David Thomson to confess that the alphabetical imperatives of his Biographical Dictionary of Film leave him “torn between his duty to everyone from Thorold Dickinson to Zinnemann and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress”) starts slapping Walker around in the living room. He has survived getting shot on the Rock, and he stands there and takes it, like a rock. At the end of this sequence (which can be seen on YouTube, with Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” cleverly substituting for the original audio) Angie collapses in the face of—at the feet of—his implacable Walkerness. Next she sets in motion a kind of revolt of the appliances, turning on every mixer, stereo, blender, toaster, and gadget in the modernist house where they’re holing up. Earlier, after she’d helped him get to Mal in the Huntley, she’d left him in the street with the parting words, “You died at Alcatraz, all right.” In this she was echoing Boorman’s suspicion that one of the things that drew Marvin to the role was the fear “that he had lost some essential element of his humanity in [the] brutal experience” of fighting and being wounded as a combat marine in the Pacific. Certainly it’s only as a result of violence that Walker ends up in Chris’s arms, after she decks him with a pool cue. This is not the only time that violence has the quality of quasi-erotic dance. The ballet of assault and battery that erupts backstage at the nightclub—with the projections and blaring funk, it’s like an auto-destructive Happening—comes to a climax with Walker taking deliberate aim and punching one of his assailants between the legs. Mal thinks he’s about to have sex with Chris (at last) only to find that it’s Walker and his naked gun—the white hair encourages this association—inching their hard way toward him under the slinky color-coordinated sheet. That sheet is the only thing he’s wearing as he’s sashayed to the penthouse balcony, forced to acknowledge that, since it barely covers him, it’s not going to serve as much of a parachute. It’s not just a matter of movement, either the actors’ or the camera’s; it’s also about Marvin’s “way of looking”—Thomson again—“when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire.” Which brings us back to his money, to that ninety-three grand he’s determined to get his hands on. The violence might not be a means to get at the money; it might be a way of buying narrative opportunities for inflicting—and being on the receiving end of—hurt. Either way, as he kneels down to rip open the packet of money with his handgun in the concrete trickle of the LA River, he doesn’t seem unduly surprised or concerned to find that it’s stuffed with worthless paper. Maybe he’s relieved because what would he go on to do if he did get his $93K back? That’s a question he’s not going to answer until, with the inevitability of a parable, we end up back where it all started—or ended—at Alcatraz.

Point Blank “did well” when it opened but, in Boorman’s words, “was not a blockbuster.” In France (understandably and a little surprisingly since L’Anglais Boorman had out-Frenched the French in their fascination with the cinematic possibilities of American policiers) it was acclaimed as a masterpiece. That’s been the consensus verdict for a long time now, but—and this is not always the case, as the accumulation of praise can cause masterpieces to suffer a paradoxical softening or erosion—it retains the jagged shock and jolt of its initial execution and release. An unexpected dissenter is Quentin Tarantino, who, in Cinema Speculation, is dismissive of both the film (“After the show-off opening Point Blank settles down into sixties television”) and its star, who acts “like a leafless tree.” Hmm. That is less persuasive and less important than the way Point Blank has embedded itself in movie culture as source, influence, and reference point. Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets has a Point Blank poster on his bedroom wall and, in a more mature incarnation, in Reservoir Dogs, listens as Michael Madsen tells him, “I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan, aren’t ya?” I’d always assumed this was a bit of ventriloquism on Tarantino’s part. And even if it’s not and he’s not (a fan) I can’t help but associate the attempted smackdown with that of Angie Dickinson: assault as expression of frustrated love.

This essay © Geoff Dyer. All quotations here, unless otherwise attributed, are from John Boorman’s Adventures of a Suburban Boy.