Art Vandelay First time I saw Point Blank I thought it was an empty wank-fest. Maybe it didn't appeal to me because I saw it on a cheap VHS tape rented from Movies-R-Us in the 90s. But along comes TCM and I got to see it in its widescreen format. Then I saw it again. And again. And again. Each time around there's something more to discover, even though on the surface it is a spare, lean revenge drama. There's the cinematography. The sound. The color choices. Everyone mentons Marvin's performance, sure, but Dickinson, my goodness in that sweater dress in John Vernon's apartment, and the way she wails on Marvin's chest until she falls down exhausted. Keean Wynn, surely one of Hollywood's all-time most versatile character actors, showing up every 15 minutes or so to add a layer of creepy tension. This is a movie with zero good guys but innumerable gripping performances. One day I might even have watched it enough times to figure out the subtext, but for now it's just one great movie in what I call American movie-making's greatest decade between Bonnie & Clyde (released nearly simultaneously to Point Blank) and Jaws.

stevielanding Lee Marvin was great at not acting. In every movie, he stands there silently watching all the other actors until eventually he does something (usually very slowly). Rumor has it that Keanu Reeves studied his method religiously.Marvin plays a dead guy -- no, a dying guy -- no, a guy who almost died -- even the director said he didn't know and didn't care. Anyway, Marvin gets double-crossed by his buddy; so Marvin spends his time either bumbling his way into unintentional deaths or watching other people murder people. One highlight is when the hit-man is ordered to kill Marvin and instead kills the very guy who ordered the hit. The hit-man can pick off a moving target at great distance, but apparently he had trouble seeing Marvin pushing his boss out into the open and he had trouble seeing that his boss was not Marvin. Until later. Then he reported to the next higher boss that he killed his boss because he was there instead of Marvin. Good reasoning.And Angie is great at -- well, at being a model who gets a few lines. Her character learns that her sister just died due to Marvin scaring the holy heck out of her. So she leaves her sister to rot on the floor and goes off with Marvin. She gets to wear a few garish outfits and towards the end, for no apparent reason, she goes berserk on Marvin and then sleeps with him.The bad guys are a trip. "We don't have cash. We use checks. We can't get you your money. Only the accountant writes checks." That's what they keep telling Marvin, and apparently, it's not their concern whether Marvin kills them. They just know that they don't have cash.They threw out the script. They only liked the main character. I don't think they wrote a replacement script. I imagine each day on the set, they told Marvin to stand over there and don't say anything because that's mostly what he did.Marvin can't carry a movie. He can be great as a supporting character with his one-dimensional non-acting, but that's all. Dickinson certainly can't carry a movie. She is eye candy and nothing more. This is supposed to be an action movie, and she is the second lead playing against a guy who doesn't act, emote or move any facial muscles. That's much too much for her. She would be better as the second banana's love interest.Marvins stands and stares. Dickinson has boobs. The director had no script. That's about all.Strangely enough, because this was done like a rushed high school art project, people look for great meaning in its obvious deficiencies. No, it's not avant-garde or highly stylized. It's a bad or non-existent script with exceptionally bad editing. Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he dying? Nobody knows because (not to beat a dead horse) they didn't have a script.

christopher-underwood Based upon the superior pulp fiction book, The Hunter by the fabulous Donald E Westlake, writing as Richard Stark under which name he never put a foot wrong; how could anything go wrong? Well, it doesn't, apart from substituting the better name of 'Parker', this is just as sure fire a winner as the book. Lee Marvin is amazingly good. Quite, cool almost statuesque and then devastatingly quick and sure footed. The thrills here are not in looking out for the safety of Parker/Walker but in seeing how he will, inevitably, outwit them. A joy to watch, director Boorman always has an eye on the visuals and whilst this might not quite have the charm of Italian thrillers and gialli of the time that says more about the differences between Italian and US interior design for the exteriors are most imaginatively shot. Similarly US fashion cannot quite match the Italians but the most effective Angie Dickinson does wear at least a couple of very fetching costumes.

writers_reign This was one of several films released at a time when English Directors were shooting not only in Hollywood but working in distinctly US genres not normally associated with roast beef and two veg and as such it is no better or no worse than any of the others. Like many prolific authors associated with one genre Donald E. Westlake, who had made both a name and a young fortune out of light-hearted crime novels, thought he'd try the real thing and created a second persona under which he published a much smaller output including Point Blank in which an ultra 'hard' man, left for dead, recovers and possibly mistaking himself for Richard, Duke of York, works his way up the hierarchy of the 'organisation', offing them systematically until he reaches the top. This is, of course, the kind of role that Lee Marvin can phone in and he brings it off to a fare-thee- well leaving the undemanding entertained with it.