BT1886

Point Blank

John Boorman is a director I’ve barely scratched the surface of—the only other film of his I’ve seen is Deliverance. By the mid-to-late 1960s, cinema had begun undergoing a transformation, becoming something more violent than what came before. Point Blank, in particular, had long fascinated me, its reputation alone enough to keep it on my radar. Having finally seen it via Criterion’s brand-spanking-new restoration, it’s immediately obvious why it’s regarded so highly. I loved every bit of Boorman‘s esoteric, psychedelic, angry, postmodernist ghost story set in the swingin’ sixties. Lee Marvin’s Walker—a lead of few words—feels less like a human and more like an immovable slab of meat. Walker, quite literally, returns from the dead to exact his vengeance for a paltry sum of money that stops being an objective somewhere along the way and becomes a fixation. Boorman and Marvin bonded over the material, reportedly despising the script they were first handed and reshaping it into something far more formally daring, stripped-down, and bold. For a film this experimental, it needed a strong technical backbone to hold it in place. Philip H. Lathrop’s cinematography is central to Point Blank’s entire force, emphasizing the stark, empty modernist interiors and cold, displaced architecture. The Los Angeles Boorman visualizes here is an impersonal one, indifferent to its inhabitants and their suffering. Ostensibly a hard-boiled crime thriller, Point Blank owes far more to the French New Wave and European modernism than to any standard Hollywood crime pictures at the time. I loved everything about this. Marvin’s near-static performance, Boorman’s surreal and dreamlike direction, Johnny Mandel’s haunting soundscape—Point Blank is one of the most formally distinct films of its era, and it goes straight onto my list of perfect films. ᐅ Watched in 2026 — Ranked (https://boxd.it/RjcIq) ᐅ 1960s — Ranked (https://boxd.it/DCV9i) ᐅ Mise en Scène: Perfect Films (https://boxd.it/bATqq)

julia ♡

Point Blank

hard not to see how wildly influential this is, even 60 years later. sound design is incredible, especially with the hallway scene.