The Direct Results

[setsuled]

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Lee Marvin will stop at nothing to get the 93k owed to him by a bunch of gangsters in 1967's Point Blank. John Boorman directs this kaleidoscope of experimental action that effectively uses non-linear sounds and imagery.

I was strongly reminded of Suzuki Seijun, whose Branded to Kill came out the same year. I wonder if Boorman was influenced by Youth of the Beast or Tokyo Drifter.

The film begins with a heist gone wrong. We find a disoriented Walker (Marvin) getting shot by Mal Reese (John Vernon) in a prison cell. In voiceover, Walker wonders why he's in a prison cell and asks where he is, what's happening. The audience, having just started the movie, is right there with him.

The pieces start to come together as Walker starts to execute his plan to get what's coming to him. My favourite bit of sound experiment has the sound of Walker's footsteps layered over a sequence where he breaks into a woman's house, getting a stranglehold on her before going into the bedroom and unloading his revolver on her empty bed. Slowly we're given to understand that this is Lynne (Sharon Acker), Walker's wife.

He sits on the couch and says nothing as she, in a drug haze, answers a series of questions he doesn't ask: why she betrayed him, who she's been with since, how she feels about it. It really feels like Marvin had lines in the script and Boorman just said, "Let's try doing it without you saying anything." It works.

There's a kind of playfulness in Suzuki movies that isn't in Point Blank which, for all its off-the-wall experimentation, is fairly grim. Walker seems less like he's seeking satisfaction than like he's executing the actions requisite in a dispassionate, amoral universe.

Point Blank is available on The Criterion Channel.