Is there anything new to say about John Boorman’s Point Blank?

Does anyone have anything new to say about John Boorman’s 1967 film, Point Blank?

Those who know me or follow me on any of my various social media accounts will be familiar with the fact that I am a huge Lee Marvin fan. And no matter how my cinematic moods or tastes change, Point Blank remains a stone cold top five favourite film. I must have seen it at least half a dozen times. And I have also written/talked about it a bit.

I wrote an extensive piece on the film’s 50^th anniversary for my Pulp Curry site, which looked at its significance in terms of American crime cinema and the idea of the film as a ghost story (FYI that site also contains essays on the other film adaptations of Donald Westlake’s Parker character). For the British Film Institute, I wrote about it in the context of other crime films with narratives that bend and warp time. I discussed Boorman’s film in the context of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) in a recent video essay the evolution of British gangster cinema. And, if you really have some time on your hands, you can check out this 2021 episode of The Projection Booth podcast in which Mike White, Jedidiah Ayres and I dissect Boorman’s classic from multiple angles.

So, yeah, it is a film I feel I am well across.

But, as it turns out, there is always more to learn. This was my conclusion after reading Eric G. Wilson’s BFI Film Classics monograph on Point Blank, which my daughter (good taste that she has) gave me for Christmas. I love a good film monograph and this one was excellent. In addition to a fascinating deep dive into the film’s experimental style, Wilson embarks on a discussion of the film’s exploration of toxic masculinity and corporate American alienation (extensively covered in a lot of writing on the film), as well as gender fluidity (something I had not thought about). He also posits Point Blank as a text on trauma and loss.

But the most enjoyable and new to me aspect of Point Blank that I got from the monograph was the connections Wilson makes to numerous films, many of which I have not seen. You’ve probably watched Point Blank (and, if you haven’t, stop reading now and go and watch it). But here are ten films Wilson discusses that you may not have seen or have even thought about in the context of Boorman’s picture.

The Cobweb (1955)

Vincente Minnelli’s overheated mid-century melodrama about the passions and dramas amongst staff and patients in a private psychiatric clinic is the film that Walker briefly watches while he is waiting for the syndicate leader Brewster to arrive at his LA pad (it is the scene just before Chris, in frustration at his lack of communication, tries to slap the crap out of Walker).

The 400 Blows (1959)

Francois Truffaut’s classic about a young boy’s descent into crime is referenced in the context of Point Blank’s ending, which like The 400 Blows, sees a main character left, in Wilson’s words, both ‘both desolate and liberated’

Hiroshima Mon Armour (1959)

Point Blank, like Alain Resnais’s story of an affair between a French actress and a married Japanese architect in post war Hiroshima, can be viewed as a meditation on trauma and the passage of time.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

Wilson writes that John Boorman originally considered giving the role of Chris, that went to Angie Dickinson, to Kim Novak. This was based on Novak’s performance in several films, including Strangers When We Meet, in which a bored married suburban architect (played by Kirk Douglas), has an affair with a woman living on his street. This film sounds great. It also sounds like half the American films made in the first half of the 1960s.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

A cynical, pleasure seeking American naval officer during WWII (James Garner) finds his attitudes to sex and life challenged when he falls in love with a woman (Julie Andrews) and is sent on a dangerous pre-D-Day mission. Director of Photography on Point Blank, Philip H. Lathrop, was nominated for an Academy Award for this work on The Americanization of Emily. Lathrop also operated the camera for one of the most original and still discussed shots in film history, the twelve minute take that opens Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958).

The Sandpiper (1965)

One of the many aspects of Point Blank that I love is its eerie, discordant soundtrack by Johnny Mandel, who won a Grammy for his score on The Sandpiper. Another overheated mid-century melodrama, its stars Richard Burton as a married headmaster who has an affair with Elizabeth Taylor’s free spirit single mother. Fun fact: Mandel would also go on to compose the score for the Tv series M*A*S*H that ran from 1972-1978.

Catch Us If You Can Aka Having a Wild Weekend (1965)

Boorman’s first feature film dealt with a young model who runs off with a member of the crew working on meat advertisement she is shooting. One of the many films that tapped into London’s ‘swinging sixties’ vibe, it received middling reviews but got Boorman noticed in Hollywood, eventually leading to the Point Blank job.

Grand Prix (1966)

Point Blank’s film editor was Henry Berman, fresh from an Academy Award for his work on John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix.

The Outside Man (1972)

Wilson namechecks a number of films in which European directors bring an innovative outsider’s perspective to Los Angeles: Jacques Deny in Model Shop (1969), Michelangelo Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), Polanski in Chinatown (1974), and Jacques Deray in this Italian French thriller. A French hitman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) travels to LA to kill a mobster, but is then subsequently double crossed himself. It also stars Dickinson, Ann-Margret and Roy Scheider. The Outside Man has been on the list of films I want to see for ages but the only copies I can find come from overseas and are, hence, hideously expensive.

The Limits of Control (2009)

Point Blank’s influence of subsequent crime film is legion, Nolan’s Memento (2000),Drive (2011), The Limey, which I have already mentioned, and Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control, which centres on a mysterious loner doing a criminal job.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990

You may have already seen me hawking this on the socials but check out the stunning cover for the upcoming book I’ve co-edited with the wonderful New York-based film critic, Samm Deighan. Designer John Yates has done a terrific job with the exploitation film poster-style aesthetic (there are definite merch possibilities here).

I’m incredibly proud of this book, which is also going to be beautifully illustrated in full colour. It is out late 2024 via PM Press, but I believe you might already be able to pre-order it via the page for the book on their website here.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990 covers an incredibly broad and diverse body of cinema, spanning from the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through to the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late ‘80s.

It focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. The book also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades.

Many of these movements were deeply connected with and expressed their values through art, literature, popular culture, and, of course, cinema. Twelve authors, including academics and well know film critics, deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the financing, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions.

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback 

Lastly, my book length examination of post-war Australian pulp publisher, Horwitz Publications is now available in paperback from Anthem Press. This is one of the few detailed examinations of a pulp publisher out there in the world, so if pulp is your thing and you have a few spare dollars/pounds lying about, you might want to consider picking it up.

The book not only looks the genres Horwitz published, but the writers and artists who worked for it, including some ground-breaking research on Australian female pulp writers. It also reveals the hidden role that Horwitz, derided purely as a low rent purveyor of cheap, salacious fiction for most of its existence, had in the take up of the paperback by mainstream Australian publishers, as well as how Horwitz pulp was a key vehicle for powerful vernacular modernist currents that coursed through Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.