Christopher Rhoten
The plot of John Boorman’s 1967 neo-noir film Point Blank is unremarkable. During a robbery, career criminal Walker (Lee Marvin) is double-crossed by his friend and wife and left for dead. Sometime later, Walker returns, hell-bent on vengeance and determined to track down his cut of the robbery that he never received: a comparatively insignificant $93,000. Walker goes on a rampage across LA, exacting personal revenge and working his way up the ladder of the crime syndicate that hoards his slice of the pie. Swap out a few keywords, and I could be describing any number of forgettable pulp crime flicks.
But while plot can make a film unique or interesting, it should never be confused with story. Point Blank is a straightforward crime thriller only if you’re reading the synopsis on Wikipedia. Watching the film is a different experience entirely, thanks to director John Boorman and star Lee Marvin’s willingness to transform noir’s private eye into a near-mythic revenant of forward momentum.
Point Blank is a ’60s crime thriller, but it blends in influences and storytelling techniques that were uncommon at the time. Characters are simultaneously dead and alive. The past coexists with the present. And Boorman, who later directed Excalibur, might as well be comparing Walker’s quest for retribution to the Holy Grail. The sex, money, and violence of the novel’s plot remain, and the film certainly delivers cold-as-ice revenge. But it is equally interested in using those tropes to deconstruct the psyche of the archetypal noir protagonist.
The most important thing to note is that Walker might be a ghost. A little plot recap will be necessary: the first image we see in Point Blank is Marvin bathed in red light, looking disoriented and confused, as if being awakened by the very act of starting the film (a shot that we will later see in context during the nightclub scene). The second image is of Walker being abruptly shot from, well, point-blank range. The title card appears as two gunshots ring out, and our leading man collapses to the ground, where he then lies motionless. This is immediately followed by narration:
Cell. Prison cell. How’d I get here?
The film then jumps back and forth as Walker recalls the robbery’s planning and subsequent betrayal. Multiple lines are spoken twice: once quietly, perhaps in Walker’s head, and then again, more frantically, in flashbacks. The opening ends with another line from Walker’s interior monologue:
Did it happen? A dream…a dream…
From the get-go, Boorman establishes that both tenses of time are in question. As the recovering Walker wanders through the halls and exterior of Alcatraz, Johnny Mandel’s mournful and elegiac score sets the tone for a story that almost certainly isn’t as cut and dry as it reads on paper.
The first step in Walker’s revenge tour is confronting his wife. Boorman shows Walker stomping briskly through a remarkably bare airport and cuts immediately to Lynne waking up in her bed, as if she can sense his arrival before it takes place. The rhythmic clacking of Walker’s footsteps has a trancelike effect, punctuated by him violently bursting through the door and riddling her empty bed with bullets. In the following scene, the film’s most overtly dreamlike, Walker sits and stares into space as she absentmindedly laments her betrayal. “I’m glad you’re alive, Walker. Really, I am.” Neither character looks at the other, and Lynne answers questions that Walker doesn’t even ask, as if she were speaking to a spirit that is silently haunting her.
Walker drifts to sleep, but when he awakens, she has overdosed on sleeping pills. He returns to Lynne’s bedroom, where, suddenly, both her body and the furniture are nowhere to be found. Rather than marvel at this incredible impossibility, Walker simply sits in a corner and looks around at the now bare walls, seemingly unconcerned. Perhaps a way of telling us Walker never left that fateful cell.
Beyond these conspicuous moments, there are also subtler flourishes that further erode the boundary between dream and reality. One example is how the film treats the present itself as subjective. An image that the film replays over and over—that slow-motion shot of Walker firing into Lynne’s bed—uses a different take three separate times. The same is true for multiple shots of Walker unloading his gun on Lynne’s coffee table; in the initial scene, he flips the pistol to his left, and in a flashback, he rotates it clockwise.
Consider also how Walker has brown hair before the robbery and then reappears on the ferry with every hair on his head ghostly white. Or how Walker switches between suits frequently despite going from Point A to Point B (suits that, curiously, reflect the colors of his environment). Or how Walker is often framed from behind something that filters his vision, such as a screen door or a sheer curtain. Or, in the most significant leap of all, how a wounded man manages to swim to shore over a mile from Alcatraz Island. This is a feat explicitly described as impossible in an echoing voiceover that documents the countless deaths of prisoners who attempted the same escape.
The question of Walker’s survival is raised on the ferry to Los Angeles, where he is confronted by Yost. “How did you make it, Walker?” asks the mysterious lawman, who serves as a psychopomp on Walker’s voyage into the syndicate’s underworld. He appears out of thin air multiple times to point Walker in the right direction or offer advice. When Walker begins his own investigative work, Yost literally walks into frame to set things back on track. Later, the two meet to discuss which link in the chain to target next. Walker asks where this man can be located, but Yost reveals that they’re already at his house, as if he has already spawned Walker into the location.
Perhaps Walker is a literal dead man walking, a spirit still trapped on Alcatraz. Or maybe the events of the film are a dying dream, with Yost a stand-in for Satan, tempting Walker with a vision of vengeance in exchange for his soul. After all, Walker doesn’t directly kill anyone in the story; all of his destruction comes by proxy of being in the right place at the right time. The only thing we can confirm is that there is no confirmation. If we understand his Blu-ray commentary track as his final say on the matter, Boorman still remains resistant to any specific interpretation.
What is clear is that Point Blank is a movie about identity and memory. The protagonist is a man who lost everything in a single night: his wife, his friend, his money, perhaps even his life. Walker’s attempt to reclaim his cash stems from a desire to understand a world much more complex than he realized. Much of the film’s middle section involves Walker forming an unlikely alliance with Lynne’s sister, Chris, who seems to both hate and find him irresistible. But even this dream, if we could refer to it as such, remains just that as the story unfolds. “What’s my last name?” she asks him. “What’s my first name?” he replies, which highlights the anonymity and disconnection within his own revenge fantasy.
Walker refuses to leave, yet he has nowhere to go. This is further exemplified by the third act’s increasingly intrusive flashbacks to previous events. When Walker wakes up Chris, we see a quick flash of him doing the same earlier in the movie. When he pistol-whips a man, Boorman replays a shot from an earlier nightclub brawl. “What do you really want?!” he’s asked yet again. “Well, I really want my money,” he replies matter-of-factly. Immediately, another flashback plays of Walker uttering this exact phrase. Walker himself seems to become aware of the loop in this moment; he is asking the same questions and interrogating virtually the same men.
This experience is deeply reflective of the setting, as the 1960s were a period when the United States struggled to come to terms with the Vietnam War’s implications. Like many citizens, Walker wakes up to a life totally different from what he is used to. The structure he has believed in—marriage, brotherhood, loyalty—is now gone, and the enemy is a never-ending ladder of indistinguishable corporate stooges who keep telling Walker that no one is really in control, so no one can really give him anything. The crime syndicate Walker targets is collectively known as “The Organization,” about as faceless a moniker as possible.
Like a soldier returning from war, Walker’s role in society is now obsolete. The landscape of Point Blank’s production design features modern corporate offices and large, characterless buildings. Not only is there no one willing to pay him, but no one even has the physical cash. Walker’s struggles are not met so much with blunt resistance as with modernist obfuscation and artifice. Furthermore, the ending, a reveal that Walker has been manipulated by Yost (actually Fairfax, the syndicate’s leader all along) into cutting his organization’s dead weight, is another example of betrayal and manipulation by a figure of authority. Another example of Walker being nothing but a cog in the machine. The fantasy over, Walker walks backwards into the shadows and disappears.
Boorman has stated that the film is, in many ways, about Lee Marvin himself. Marvin, who served as a Marine in World War II, was wounded in the assault on Saipan and received a Purple Heart; most of his unit was killed, with only one other member surviving. Like Marvin, Walker comes back from his experience determined but also hardened and alienated.
This is also why Marvin wrestled complete creative control from the studio only to defer it to a relatively unknown director making his sophomore feature film—by all accounts, only Boorman fully understood the exorcising power of making his film. And Marvin’s performance in the movie could not better reflect this sentiment, or lack thereof: he is stoic, blunt, and unpassionately violent, the only constant in a shifting, abstract dream. See the scene where Chris punches Walker over and over, only to collapse from exhaustion while his imposing frame remains unmoved.
The persistent formal experimentation stems from Boorman’s appreciation of the French New Wave, specifically the avant-garde Left Bank films of Alain Resnais. Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, released six years earlier, is spatially and temporally ambiguous, with characters seemingly stuck at a purgatorial hotel. Nearly every trick used here can be found in Resnais’s film, such as detached narration, elliptical editing, and liberal use of dream logic. And perhaps the still images used in the film’s opening credits were inspired by another Left Bank film, La Jetée. One important distinction, of course, is that those films are black-and-white, while Point Blank is in color; Boorman’s skillful use of temperature to reflect reality and unreality was an original addition.
While Point Blank’s own influences could be deciphered nearly sixty years ago, only now can we fully appreciate just how influential the film itself has been. With its wartime disillusionment and intentional sense of style, Boorman’s film was virtually the first thoroughly modern neo-noir (though it was preceded and followed by Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Melville’s Le Samouraï in the same year). It was also an early example of New Hollywood’s emerging incorporation of European filmmaking techniques.
While not all of the film’s radical formal experimentation was immediately replicated, subsequent American noirs quickly adopted Point Blank‘s existential intensity, as seen in The Long Goodbye (1973), The Parallax View (1974), and eventually, Taxi Driver (1976). Action films in general would continue the trend of becoming more violent, spurred on by both this movie and Bonnie and Clyde, another New Hollywood film released the same year.
Today, Point Blank’s impact is almost impossible to trace in full. Over the decades, the film’s stylistic innovations have rippled through cinema as well, as more directors attempt to fuse boilerplate pulp with the abstract or the surreal. Steven Soderbergh has described his flashback-heavy The Limey (1999) as a loving homage to Boorman. Walter Hill drew inspiration from the script’s simplicity for sparse, minimalist action films like The Driver (1978).
Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) both replicate Boorman’s use of urban architecture as a reflection of the psychological, while Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) channels the film’s fractured, hyper-stylized sense of detachment. More modern films display inspiration likely achieved through osmosis; movies from Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, 2011) and Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, 2017) embody Point Blank’s surreal and elliptical approach to characterization, editing, and visual flair.
The film’s enduring impact on mainstream action also speaks to its multifaceted legacy. The original club fight in John Wick (2014) was envisioned as an homage to the one in Point Blank; even Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) names a character Walker and introduces him marching down a hallway. It’s inarguable that Boorman’s narrative, visual, and structural experimentation has helped define a global language of cool existentialism, far more than viewers might realize. The film was also included in the National Film Registry in 2016, further cementing its legacy.
At the end of Point Blank, the camera returns to Alcatraz and remains focused on the island until the credits finish rolling and the film concludes. Walker himself might still be stuck in that jail cell, but that ambiguity is the source of the film’s power—and while it is celebrated as a quintessential crime thriller, its influence has long since escaped any confinement to subgenre or era. It is impossible to discuss neo-noir without Point Blank, and nearly sixty years later, it might still be the defining example.
