Kritiken

Grim, violent, elliptical, transfixingly sour and strange, it remains, 50 years later, a vital link between old and new, seeming at times like the tail end of classic noir, at others like the first sign of something fresh. It's a hybrid of American, British, and French influences that becomes very much its own thing.

Boorman launched Marvin across time, his progress, heavy footfall on the soundtrack, as he cuts a wave of destruction across San Francisco looking for satisfaction. Point Blank illustrated just how close we could come to screen violence, how alive a city could look as an action hero spread death across it like a plague.

It was destined to slowly emerge as the rock-steady base of his reputation amongst cinephiles and an archetype and benchmark for the cinematic adventurousness of the period, all the more interesting and rich for being matched to genre storytelling. In Boorman's hands, the script, credited to Alexander Jacobs and David and Rafe Newhouse, was transformed into a fractured and hallucinatory experience.

Point Blank works best, for me, as a work of searing criticism: against corporate monoculture (whose insidious blankness seems both cruel and absurd), the hippy-dippy counterculture of the ‘60s (which Boorman depicts as superficially transgressive but ultimately facile), and even the modern cult of masculinity (here rendered as a myth that leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering).

Point Blank, for all the immaculate deadliness of Marvin, wouldn't be anywhere the same without its secret linchpin, Angie Dickenson... Dickenson had the composure to look Marvin in the eye and meet him as an equal... Of all the mod action-figure couples, they had a more viscerally melancholy chemistry than Belmondo and Karina (too convoluted and intellectualized), Beatty and Dunaway (too expedient), or Delon and his mirrors (a hair too perfect).

John Boorman made a complete cycle of Jean-Pierre Melville's adoption of American pop culture, re-applying the Frenchman's modernist, hyper-cool distillation of noir and gangster tropes Stateside. The results are dazzling, a cubist genre picture whose achronological editing predicted by a good few decades the wave of post-Tarantino timeline futzing that has rarely approached this film's sense of evocation and implication.

One could view Point Blank as the exact mid-point between Mike Hodges' Get Carter and Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance, borrowing the concentrated male fury of the former with the intuitive, almost musical editing of the latter. But it's still very much its own film, giving a sparkling burnish to one of the most ironclad narrative templates Hollywood has ever deigned to store in its arsenal.

Slick, sexy, and just plain cool, POINT BLANK is a remarkably confident piece of filmmaking (especially for a second feature), the influence of which can still be felt today, whether emanating from Nicolas Winding Refn's DRIVE or surfacing in small bursts in the current season of MAD MEN. A masterpiece of off-the-rails machismo.

If Resnais made crime thrillers…The grimy smudge in the Alcatraz cell at the onset might be Proust's "little patch of yellow wall" (The Captive), the dying Bergotte here becomes Lee Marvin's double-crossed thug Walker, sprawled on the floor. "Did it happen? A dream?" In John Boorman's hands, Donald E. Westlake's pulp novel becomes a boundlessly inventive modernist welter of alienation, identity, and memory.

Its almost Proustian reliance on gestures and actions as triggers for memory, configuring memory as much an exterior as interior manifestation of the contemporary mediated world, emphasises the physical, and thus mental, relationships between people and their built environments.

Influenced by the French New Wave's radical formal innovations, the European ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni's films, and the genre revisionism of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Boorman set out to make a thriller that looked and felt like nothing else before it, using widescreen Panavision cinematography, explosive colors, and a multi-layered soundtrack to re-envision the noir picture as highbrow Euro-art film.

John Boorman's modernist, noirish thriller (1967) is still his best and funniest effort... Boorman's treatment of cold violence and colder technology has lots of irony and visual flash—the way objects are often substituted for people is especially brilliant, while the influence of pop art makes for some lively 'Scope compositions—and the Resnais-like experiments with time and editing are still fresh and inventive.