The movie Brian De Palma called “a surrealistic gangster picture”
Suspense, examinations of the darker side of the human psyche and a unique blend of surrealism and drama are all things that make up the phenomenal filmography of the inimitable filmmaker Brian De Palma. Throughout his remarkable career, he’s woven tales that stand up next to the work of his idol, Alfred Hitchcock.
Films such as Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double have seen De Palma weave narratives with a surreal edge that persistently teeter on the borders of the dreamlike. When the iconic director named his favourite guilty pleasure movies, he paid particular attention to a crime film that portrayed its story in the surrealistic vision for which he is personally known.
“Now, Point Blank is a surrealistic gangster picture,” De Palma once told Film Comment. “You get into the mind of an obsessive guy who’s gonna get these guys who took his money. The whole movie is ‘Gimme my money back!’ Lee Marvin goes through incredible things to get his money back. Nothing will stop him. He’s like the Terminator.”
The director continued: “If anyone gets in his way, he knocks ’em down. They say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ He says, ‘I can’t?’ and picks ’em up and clobbers ’em.” Point Blank arrived on screens in 1967 with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn and Carroll O’Connor, all starring in the adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s crime noir pulp fiction novel The Hunter, published in 1963.
Martin had personally requested that Boorman direct the film, and the actor had also played a crucial role in bringing the production to fruition. Point Blank is considered a cult classic of the 1960s crime film world and saw Boorman fuse the tropes and motifs of the film noir genre with elements and stylistic touches of the nouvelle vague.
Going on to explain the plot of Boorman’s film, De Palma continued, “Marvin throws John Vernon—the guy who set him up, shot him, and screwed his wife—off the top of a building. In the beginning, they have these shots of him walking down a hallway, and you see his shoes, the intensity driven by these shoes pounding out boom-boom-boom.”
The director signed off with his memories of Point Blank, “It’s intercut with him waiting outside his ex-wife’s place to see when the money arrives. When she comes to the door to get the money, he knocks the door open, grabs her by the hair, and puts a gun to her head. The boom-boom-boom of his shoes walking down this hallway is intercut with this stakeout in such a way to become a surrealistic projection of his obsession.”
Check out the trailer for John Boorman’s Point Blank below.
