The film became a big blockbuster, thus practically ushering the age of ‘New-Hollywood’, where American mainstream cinema would expand its boundaries considerably by giving new filmmakers immeasurable freedom to experiment with form and content. The year 1967 proved to be the turning point in this regard director Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, by pretty much following the ‘New Wave’ European sensibilities to the letter. So, it was only a matter of time that American cinema too embrace this form of avant-garde, Postmodern filmmaking. Even as this was going on, French masters like Godard and Truffaut were re-imagining the traditional American gangster\noir thrillers through their European sensibilities, and making films like ‘ Breathless‘ by breaking every conventional narrative technique associated with traditional American cinema. After Douglas Sirk reinvented the soapy melodrama in the 1950s, it was left to Italian maestro Sergio Leone to reinvent the beloved American genre of ‘Western’ with his own brand of operatic, revisionist ‘Euro-Westerns’ made in Italy and other parts of Europe. It was mainly European directors who was behind this kind of revisionism. The good guys were becoming bad guys, the bad guys were now being cast in a sympathetic light the demarcation between moral and immoral was being slowly eroded, with heroes becoming blissfully amoral and villains becoming more three dimensional.
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Every movie genre was undergoing reevaluation, with filmmakers subverting and deconstructing the essential tropes and character archetypes associated with a particular genre. Apart from being an extraordinary hybrid of American and European film sensibilities, the film also provided Lee Marvin with his most iconic role.ġ960s was the decade of revisionism in American society and American cinema. But at times, it feels a touch self-conscious – a box of directorial tricks employed to compensate for an occasional lack of real substance elsewhere.John Boorman’s Point Blank(1967) is one of the greatest and most unusual crime\noir thrillers ever made.
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His unashamedly Godardian smash-cuts and off-kilter angles add style and there are moments of breathtaking visual creativity, from the not-quite-freeze-frames over the opening credits to a series of confrontational close-ups when things turn violent. And Angie Dickinson is equally magnificent as his squeeze Chris, simultaneously remote and needy, brittle and brash.īoorman’s flashy direction hasn’t aged quite so well. Marvin was never better, the ruthless personification of late ’60s bulldog cool, all snarling quips and sharp suits.
Walker (Lee Marvin) wants revenge on the hoods who left him for dead, so he goes out and kills them, one by one.
The story – from Donald E Westlake’s frequently adapted novel ‘The Hunter’ – is magnificently simple. British director John Boorman’s 1967 Hollywood debut (he was hired off the back of Dave Clark Five vehicle ‘Catch us if you Can’, amazingly) is a slippery beast.
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