![]() Boorman credits Marvin with coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film. The film features a fractured time-line, disconcerting narrative rhythms (long slow passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence) and a carefully calculated use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping bridges, empty prison cells). Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. Boorman believes the film is about Lee Marvin’s brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized him and left him desperately searching for his humanity. Steven Soderbergh has described Point Blank as “memory film” for Marvin. “What it is is what you see,” responded Boorman. Director Boorman claims to not have an opinion on the matter. Viewers and critics have often questioned whether or not the film is really a dream that Walker has after he is shot in the very beginning. The film has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Slant Magazine reviewer Nick Schager notes in a 2003 review: “What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman’s virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism.” Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said “as suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.” Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars: “Taut thriller, ignored in 1967, but now regarded as a top film of the decade.” In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: “A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is.” Kael later called the film “intermittently dazzling”. Margaret Booth, a legendarily traditional-minded supervising editor on the picture, told Boorman as the execs filed out, “You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!” Boorman had the pots taken out to “make it all bare.”Īfter Boorman showed the finished cut to executives, they were “very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots”. Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.ĭirector Boorman chose locations that were “stark.” For example, the airplane terminal walkway that Marvin walked down originally had flower pots lining the walls. During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison. While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed shooting on location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need to loop half the dialogue. Two weeks in the abandoned prison facility required the services of 125 crew members. This was the first film ever to shoot at Alcatraz, the infamous prison which had been shut down since 1963, only three years before the production. “It made a conventional scene something more,” added Boorman. He would just show you.” So Boorman changed the lines in the script so that Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin’s questions, and the result is in the finished film. “I saw right away he was right,” replied Boorman, “Lee never made suggestions. On the rehearsal day in which Marvin asked Sharon Acker what happened to the money, Marvin had lines which he did not speak and forced Acker to continue the conversation on her own. Rehearsals took place at Marvin’s house in Los Angeles. The unusual structure of the film was due in part to the original script and developments during the course of shooting the film. So on my very first film in Hollywood, I had final cut and I made use of it.” He said, ‘I defer all those approvals to John. ‘And I have approval of principal cast?’. Boorman recalls, “ said, ‘I have script approval?’ They said ‘yes’. Marvin called up a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent and Boorman. When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin threw the script out the window. ![]() Both hated the script but loved the main character of Walker. Boorman and Marvin talked about a script based on the book The Hunter. The film was not a box office success in 1967 but has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.ĭirector John Boorman met Lee Marvin while on the set of The Dirty Dozen in London. Boorman directed the film at Marvin’s request and Marvin played a central role in the film’s development and staging. Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin and featuring Angie Dickinson, adapted from the crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E.
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