come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 2)

It’s not that Lee Marvin didn’t appear in some incredible projects prior to “Point Blank” (1967, dir. John Boorman), nor that all of his subsequent films were that inferior in comparison; it’s just that this one movie is a work of such perfectly realized synthesis of story, performance and production that should it be the work by either Marvin or Boorman that survives one hundred years from now, both of them will still be assured a place in the film canon. When considered in the context of his career arch, this is an odd movie for Marvin to have chosen at that particular time: the phenomenal success of the just released “The Dirty Dozen” offered him a very comfortable career path, making the kind of over-blown epics that Hollywood was still desperately trying to convince the American public mattered. But while Lee Marvin could have easily slid into the kind of roles a now rapidly aging John Wayne could no longer play, he instead chose this strange little project about a -possibly dead- loner fixated on retrieving the ninety-three thousand dollars stolen from him. Because he proved to be reticent about his acting in interviews (usually dismissing the whole business with a few gruff barks about money and dames), we’ll never know for sure why he chose this movie; did he sense the direction motion pictures were heading, that the big, CinemaScope colossus was a doomed creature, a dinosaur of old Hollywood already extinct (at least until it would be resurrected ten years later as the special effects spectacle)? Or was Lee Marvin revealing an interest in his craft, and an instinct about seeking out quality work, well beyond what we give him credit for? He’s usually categorized amongst those actors who, while stumbling on good roles now and then, typically accepted roles based solely on immediate (monetary) gains. While this could sadly be said of his last films, the choice of “Point Blank” as follow-up to “The Dirty Dozen” was a bold move, one that could have easily turned out to be a damaging one.
A lot of the reason this was such a bold move on Lee Marvin’s part, was the director. Whereas “The Dirty Dozen” was directed by the legendary –if sometimes hackish- veteran Robert Aldrich, whose body of work included such essential movies as “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”(1962) and “Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte(1964), “Point Blank” would be directed by an untested English newcomer. While he would go on to give us such brilliant (if perhaps slightly goofy) movies as “Deliverance” (1972), “Zardoz” (1974) and “Excaliber” (1981), the only major motion picture John Boorman had directed at that point was “Catch Us If You Can” (1965)- a vehicle built around those forgettable (and forgotten) scalawags of Mersey Beat, the Dave Clark Five. But there was something about the young (he was thirty at the time) man that was appealing, and Marvin agreed to work with him. What Lee Marvin didn’t find appealing though, was the original script. Told countless times over the years, Boorman has recounted how Marvin, growling “this is shit” threw the original draft out the hotel window, into the rainy London night. Interestingly, that first version, that both the star and director thought lacked the energy and originality the project demanded, would survive on a shelf somewhere, waiting for its’ chance to bring cinematic banality to the screen. More than thirty years later, when part-time actor/director and full-time alcoholic/anti-semite Mel Gibson would be searching for another project best suited to inflict his unique brand of bland charisma on the viewing public, he would find that original (rejected) script, and shoot it under the name of “Payback”. According to a highly amused Boorman, that more recent production, though devoutly loyal to the first script (except for the timely addition of shits and fucks to the dialogue), proves that what is hackneyed and flat in 1967, isn’t going to get any better with age.
While it is ostensively a revenge story (and the marketing packaged it as such), the film actually subverts that expectation. Much has been written about the possibility that Lee Marvin’s character Walker dies from the gun shots received by his betraying partner and wife in the film’s opening, and that everything that occurs after is either the revenge fantasy of a dying man, or that he’s actually returned from the grave to haunt those who turned on him. As he swims from Alcatraz, his body riddled with bullets, Walker’s voice-over asks, “Did it happen? A Dream? A Dream.” The film then cuts (with no explaination) to the tour boat, where he meets Yost (Keenan Wynn), while over their conversation, the tour guide tells the story of all the failed escape attempts made from the prison. There are other examples, too many to recount here. Aside from ‘blowing our minds’, what’s exciting about the possibility that Walker is actually dead is that it’s never explicitly stated, addressed or resolved. Too many filmmakers today credit their audience with too little intelligence, so that someone like a M. Night Shyamalan or a movie like “Hostel” waste the final reel carefully explaining to the viewer exactly what we’ve been watching and what it all means. There was a time, all but forgotten, when filmmakers expected their audience to pay attention and participate in the movie experience, that we were capable of understanding complex, intelligent ideas buried beneath the surface of a story. The insult implicit in movies like “The Village”, “Eyes Wide Shut” and “War Of The Worlds” is that we are such dull-witted, easily distracted children that we are incapable of understanding anything more subtle than a large, neon arrow guiding us to the point.


While I’ve come across a lot of writing theorizing about Walker imagining the whole thing as he bleeds out on the cell floor, what I haven’t found is anyone who suggests that if he is, it’s not a peaceful or happy fantasy he’s having. Regardless of what the posters and trailer promise, this is not a Lee Marvin kicks ass movie (the original tagline: “There are two kinds of people in his up-tight world: his victims and his women. And sometimes you can't tell them apart”). Not only does he fail to ever lay hands on the ninety-three thousand he’s fixated on, Walker never even gets the satisfaction of revenge. Despite the fact that the image of him holding a gun dominates this movie, Walker only fires it once, emptying it into his soiled and empty marital bed. At every turn, Walker is robbed of his chance of revenge: his adulterous wife kills herself, taking an overdose of pills on the same mattress he had earlier unloaded his (impotent?) rage into. Mel Reese (played with brilliant loathsomeness by John Veron), the former partner who not only betrayed him and left him for dead, but also stole his wife, falls to his death just as Walker’s elaborate plan to capture him succeeds. At each step up the Organization’s ladder, Walker is beaten. Carter kills Big John, and is then killed himself by Brewster’s hitman. At the film’s climax (back at Alcatraz), Brewster is then dispatched by Fairfax, who turns out to have been Walker’s guide throughout the film, Yost. This, the movie where Lee Marvin is at his masculine peak, is, in reality, his most emasculated role. Walker is a tough guy, certainly, one of the most rugged tough guys in film history. He’s so tough he barely speaks, and when he does, it’s limited to either the demanding of his money, or bluntly informing them that he will kill them if they fail to pay up. He never asks his wife or Mel why they betrayed him, is so stoic it’s hard to tell if he even cares anymore. In one of Boorman’s more inspired choices, he has the wife both ask and answer the questions Walker should be asking, instead of just staring silently at the floor. He doesn’t speak at all during the entire scene at her house, until after she’s dead and he threatens Big John’s courier-people only exist for Walker when they posses information pertaining to his money. Walker is both the ultimate idealization of manhood, and that very same manhood rendered impotent. If, as many theorize, the movie is Walker’s dying fantasy, then it is a fantasy built out of helplessness and castration-anxiety. If, as others have suggested, Walker is already dead, then his travels are the travels of a damned soul, suffering the torture of a customized hell.
For those of us who have experienced the cinematic sludge that the ‘thriller’ has been reduced to over the last quarter century, it’s always a jolt to be reminded that the visual tone of a film used to be more than establishment shots and close-ups used for (cheap) emotional triggers. The craftsmanship of “Point Blank”, both in its’ look and its’ use of sound, is impressive, especially for an inexperienced director. Each stage of Walker’s journey has its’ own signature color (his wife’s house is in all grays, Carter’s office in green, Reese’s penthouse reds, Brewster’s orange). The Movie House, the club owned by Chris (Angie Dickinson), provided probably the movie’s most cinematic moment, when Walker is fighting two of Big John’s thugs behind the movie screen (so that the projected image is reversed), while the performing soul singer screams louder and louder (for a bizarrely stiff and formal audience of middle-aged white men). Even something as potentially mundane as Walker arriving from the airport is treated with significance, the steady, determined stomp of Marvin’s over-sized feet keeping tempo on the soundtrack for just a minute of screen time. This could easily bore or alienate the audience (listening to a man walk), but very, very slowly, Boorman turns up the volume and reduces the echo, building the anticipation. The beat of Walker walking (hey!) stops, not when he leaves the airport, but when he suddenly bursts through his wife’s door, pinning her to the floor and assuming a defensive position with his gun drawn.







It is hard to say this movie is the best performance Lee Marvin ever gave: there certainly are others that he instilled with a far richer humanity and realism. But it is the performance in “Point Blank” that Lee Marvin is his most…Lee Marvin like. Whereas he defined characters like Chino and Meatball with an almost psychotic level of energy, he so understates Walker, so successfully hides from us what his character is thinking, that we are left with one of the screen’s great enigmas. Walker is constantly fighting exhaustion; during his wife’s monologue and then later as Brewster explains to him how the Organization works, Walker is collapsed on a couch, obviously struggling against the desire to lay down and sleep. Having broken into Brewster’s home, Walker and Chris get into an argument, until she finally snaps, pounding on him with all her strength. Rather than fight back, or even defend himself, Walker just stands there mutely, barely noticing as she continues to hit him until she wears herself out. He then calmly walks over to the couch, where he sits down and resumes drinking his beer. This particular point, that Walker is exerting all of his energy just to stay awake, is effectively counter-pointed in the film’s two flashback scenes, first at the beginning, when he meets Reese at the class reunion, then later during the wife’s monologue, when we watch their courtship acted out. In both of these flashbacks we see a vibrant, playful Walker interacting with two people he loves. Both of those loves turned to ash by betrayal, the Walker we watch during the ‘present’ of the movie is an empty shell, a corpse brought back to life to accomplish its’ one goal (which, again, it fails to do).
I appreciate that the use of labels like “genius” or “masterpiece” are dangerous, especially when talking about a genre work like this. Amongst many of the people who comprise the serious film world, the laurels of such lofty titles are limited to angst-riddled explorations of existential malaise and identity crisis, ideally shot with a stationary camera and ideally by a northern European. But I have no such qualms about giving this film its’ due; “Point Blank” is an exceptional example of American filmmaking, a thriller that both defines and subverts the limits of its’ own genre. An integral part of American film is succeeding at functioning on multiple levels, movies that can feed the gut, mind and soul in one passing. This is why the best westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah are infinitely more than ‘mere’ westerns, why the crime films of Coppola, Scorsese, Siegel and Kubrick are so much more than crime films. Even an over-looked genre like horror can achieve so much more when handled by a Romero, Whale, Cronenberg or even a Roger Corman (when he tries). I offer no apologies, no qualifiers; “Point Blank” is a masterpiece.
For Lee Marvin, career-defining masterpiece under his belt, the next twenty years (with several note-worthy exceptions) would be a steady and consistent decline into hack-work and irrelevance. to be continued...