Point Blank (1967) was John Boorman’s second stab at Hollywood, following on from a middling-successful comedy caper two years before.
As a relatively inexpensive British director relatively new to Hollywood, Boorman seemed a good bet for MGM, already haemorrhaging money on lavish flops like 1963’s Cleopatra. The presence of Lee Marvin shortened the odds, as did the relative tightness of Point Blank’s three-million-dollar budget.
MGM didn’t get what they bet on. They got a cold, hard vision of Los Angeles that seemed to take place in the future: except that impression was never explained. They got a soundtrack of wailing, unresolving strings, voiceovers, fragmented, dreamlike flashbacks.
They also got strongarmed out of their threat to reshoot the movie by Lee Marvin himself. A veteran of the 1944 Battle of Saipan, Marvin was the sole survivor of a massacre that cost the lives of his entire platoon.
Boorman has described how Marvin would often deviate from the script, replacing his lines with gnomic silence and letting minor characters coax his character through a revenge mission in which the protagonist himself seems curiously uninterested. His flashes of violence are mechanical, reactive. His final refusal of the prize seems less like a twist than a logical conclusion: a dead soul finding release by letting go.
This sense of solipsism is borne out by the plot’s implausibly smooth forward motion. After Lynne’s (unusually rapid) fatal overdose, a money-drop man conveniently arrives as per Reese’s orders. Walker echoes back the money-man’s words exactly, as though the scene is happening in the echo-chamber of his own dying fever dream, and immediately has his next lead: the location of Lynne’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), whose presence at the club is swapped for a violent fight-scene that Walker moves through mechanically, emerging unscathed: a third moment of substitution.
Walker inveigles Chris into an implausible plot to distract Reese and lead Walker to his man. This somehow works, but the fourth substitution quickly follows: Walker’s revenge is thwarted by Reese’s accidental plunge to his death from the apartment building, but not before Walker conveniently obtains the names of Reese’s bosses. Get the girl: kind of. Kill the friend: kind of.
Take the money? We’ll see.
After Reese dies, Chris storms off with a parting shot that alludes beyond Walker’s coldness to the atmosphere of after-death hallucination beginning to descend over the film: “You died at Alcatraz, all right. Bye, Walker.”
But the plot remains as relentless and smooth as a hallucination. Fairfax appears at the telephone kiosk and promises to help Walker take the money he’s owed.
The fifth substitution: Walker storms the Organization—quite how, we’re not shown; we presume it’s part of Fairfax’s job as the film’s recurring deus ex machina—and forces Reese’s boss into giving him the money he seeks. He soon discovers the money's been swapped for a parcel of useless papers.
Take the money? Kind of.
By the time Walker arranges for his money to be deposited at Alcatraz—through another disposable cipher deployed by the Organization—our sense of the film has is similar to those dreams in which an endlessly morphing object is endlessly sought and endlessly out of reach, always-already swapped for another object at the last moment. In dreams, as in Point Blank, the only constant is the desire itself: the objects are accidental functions discarded as the plot—and the dreamer—move forward through the visual environment’s affectless, unresisting texture.
The film’s visual language is a further reinforcement of the sense of hallucination. Boorman shot the film with a colour-scheme that slowly “heats up” throughout, from the greys and silvers of Lynne’s apartment through to the green decor and coordinated suits of the Organization’s office headquarters.
Through green we warm to the mellow Kodachrome blues and desert glare of exterior scenes to a climax of mellow colours as Walker—who has swapped his cold grey funeral suit for a red-dominated ensemble—moves through an expensive apartment all reticent woods and soft yellows. The environment proceeds from his body; the story from his mind.
Indeed, the colour-story has its own dénouement, after Walker’s refusal of the prize. As the camera swings back on Alcatraz, the prison appears softened, untroubled somehow. Since the prison verges on the edge of the shot, the emphasis is less on that location’s stark dereliction than on the sense of a liminal space, a crossing-zone, a building on the edge of a mellow nowhere. Mercury shimmer of calm water. Lilac air. Nothing else.
Walker dying in his island cell lets go of his dreams of the world, and fades into nowhere. Death-as-release: a trope from Gun Crazy, Human Desire, The Big Sleep, any number of “pure” noirs.
Walker recedes backwards into the dark above Alcatraz. Resolution as dissolution.
