Point Blank (1967)

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there.

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback.

Based on the theme of the individual pitted against the large, impersonal organization. Here the central character is an old-fashioned loner of a gunman embroiled with a large-scale, corporate criminal operation behind a respectable-looking 'front'. Without delving into psychology or motivation, the film places emphasis on action and surface appearances, superbly capturing the glossy, depersonalized feel of a 1967 Los Angeles - a nightmare landscape of concrete, glass and coiling freeways.

Mal Reese is in a real bind - owing a good deal of money to his organized crime bosses - and gets his friend Walker to join him in a heist. It goes off without a hitch but when Reese realizes the take isn't as large as he had hoped, he kills Walker - or so he thinks. Some time later, Walker decides the time has come get his share of the money and starts with his ex-wife Lynne who took up with Reese after the shooting. That leads him on a trail - to his wife's sister Chris, to Reese himself, then onto Big Stegmam, then Frederick Carter and on and up the line of gangsters all in an effort to get money from people who simply won't acknowledge that he's owed anything.

"Point Blank" is an expertly made, fast-moving film, based on the theme of the individual pitted against the large, impersonal organization. Here the central character is an old-fashioned loner of a gunman (Lee Marvin) embroiled with a large-scale, corporate criminal operation behind a respectable-looking 'front'. Without delving into psychology or motivation, the film places emphasis on action and surface appearances, superbly capturing the glossy, depersonalized feel of a 1967 Los Angeles–a nightmare landscape of concrete, glass and coiling freeways.

Ex-gunhawk meets up and coming young punk intent on proving his worth by knocking off the king of the heap. Been there, done that. Seems like Angie Dickinson played this identical part in several films; wonder if she got as bored doing it as I did watching. What was with Royal Dano doing his impersonation of an injun? The producer couldn't find the genuine article? Let this one be your last choice.

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.