Point Blank (1967): Boorman's Revenge Told in Fragments

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

A man walks down a long, echoing corridor at Los Angeles International Airport, heels hammering the terrazzo in hard mechanical strikes, and the sound keeps going after Boorman cuts away from him — over his ex-wife applying make-up, over the city sliding past a car window, over scenes he is not in yet. That corridor walk is the most famous thing in Point Blank, and it tells you everything about the film’s method. The footsteps are a heartbeat and a threat and a piece of pure rhythm, and they belong to Walker, played by Lee Marvin as a slab of grey granite with a grievance. He has been shot and left for dead on Alcatraz by his partner and his wife. He has come back for his money. The sum is $93,000, and the film treats that figure as a kind of holy number, the one clean fact in a story that keeps dissolving around it.

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Point Blank (1967): Boorman's Revenge Told in Fragments