At Last, Bloody ‘Point Blank’ Comes to DVD

Walker (Lee Marvin) has his seat belt on. The sleazy car dealer does not. “Where is Reese?” Walker asks, and drives the car into a pillar, crunching it and battering the car dealer. Then Walker reverses the car into another pillar. “Where is Reese?”

It is brutal. Not violent, but unexpected—and perfectly representative of the rest of John Boorman’s (“Deliverance”) 1967 noir “Point Blank,” now out on DVD for the first time.

The film moves to a robbery on Alcatraz. Mal Reese (John Vernon), an old friend whom Walker is accompanying, shoots two bagmen and takes their cash. This is not “Rififi.” There is none of the traditional stealth. Only bullets and Walker’s memory of the path that led to this point.

As the scene unfurls, bare and slow, Walker’s wife comforts him before Reese arrives to shoot him twice: he needs Walker’s share of the money. His wife follows her husband’s would-be murderer dutifully as Walker staggers into San Francisco Bay. The screen fades as the voice-over of a tour guide describing how hard it is to escape the prison.

Later, we see Walker make a deal with a man named Yost (Keenan Wynn), who says he will provide Walker with the whereabouts of his missing wife if Walker will demolish the crime organization Reese has joined. Walker doesn’t care. All he wants is his money. Or so he says.

The plot may seem familiar. In 1999 it was remade into Brian Helgeland’s sadomasochistic anger-porn “Payback,” starring Mel Gibson. The differences are astonishing.

“Point Blank” is worth seeing for its audacity alone. It is unclear whether the main character is alive or whether the whole movie is a dream sequence in the moment before his death. In the end, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

The disc includes a commentary conversation between Boorman and wunderkind director Steven Soderbergh (“Ocean’s 11,” “Traffic”), who begins by describing the movie as “a film I’ve stolen from so many times.”

The color palate in any scene—the greens in every scene involving the organization, the yellows of Chris, Walker’s love interest-cum-sister-in-law, played by the luscious (and, yes, that’s the only way to describe her) Angie Dickinson—complements the film’s unexplained jumps. They don’t fit logically but somehow seem emotionally perfect: Walker’s apparently unlimited supply of tight-fitting suits, for instance adhere to his moods and character development.

The love scene, if such a jumpy naturalistic sequence can be described in the same terms as the formula that’s de rigeur in genre films, seems to have inspired Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” love scene. And the pillow talk beats anything coming out of modern Hollywood. “Hey, what’s my last name?” she asks, knowing he neither knows nor cares. “What’s my first name?” he responds.

Marvin’s character has none of the sexual bravado that gives so many comparable heroes a misogynistic flavor and would make this line seem cloying or cutesy. Instead, his approach is hesitant and sorrowful. It’s perfect, coming from someone who never kills anyone in the film.

Destroying this organization is simply all he can do. Marvin casts the role with just the right note of understated anger, frustration and, most of all, confusion. He incarnates the tragic figure overwhelmed by the consequences of his violent life, assuming the morally beleaguered qualities of a late Clint Eastwood character (“Unforgiven,” “Mystic River”).

It is this ambivalence and confusion that keeps the film startlingly modern and fresh today. Look at the scene with Walker running down a white hallway and see the similar scenes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” and David O. Russell’s “I Heart Huckabees” as the lifts that they were.

See it as great modern noir. See it to understand the Beastie Boys’ many, many references to Lee Marvin. See it in hope of being the next Soderbergh. See it.

—Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.