L.A. Plays Itself in John Boorman's Point Blank

Point Blank (1967) is as much about the pathos and the existential malaise of the alienated gangster as it is about a whole city and its physical, as well as financial, infrastructure. The film starts out as a tale of revenge -a gang of three  consisting of Walker, his wife and his partner, intercepts a money-drop operation in an abandoned Alcatraz and Reese, the partner, runs off with Walker's wife and his share of the money, shooting him and leaving him near dead in  an abandoned cell. Having woken up from dead, Walker swims to escape. Some years later, we see him contemplating the view of Alcatraz and talking to a mysterious man who orders him to kill various people, to reach whom he would have to pass through Reese and his late wife's sister. 



Yet Lee Marvin's dead-pan, almost stoic Walker barely shows any feeling or reveal any motivation. Yes, there are moments of remembrance or repose, when a still melancholy comes over our lonely hero, but those are almost always accompanied by an intense restraint in Marvin's acting. And what's poignant is the sense that Walker doesn't really belong to this place and his immense, ghostly loneliness, like that moment when he's standing in front of his deceased wife's grave, unmoved, like a statue, his head framed almost ironically like a comic strip against the shiny green grass of the cemetery and the sunny cityscape of Los Angeles.


In this sense, Point Blank is a mixture of Jacques Tati's Playtime (released around the same time with this one) and Antonioni's L'Eclisse. It mixes the physical alienation of the former with the spiritual alienation of the latter, and, like both films, does this mainly through a skillful usage of architecture and space. Never as slapsticky and caricatured as Tati or as self-serious and gray as Antonioni, Boorman adopts to the unique feeling or texture of the city he's working in. So, Point Blank becomes a sun-drenched noir, set against the saturated world of comics and advertising and the tasteful products of high fashion and design. 


And like the physical world around him Walker is also unable to penetrate and understand the workings of a dubious corporate organization called, well, 'The Organization.' Adrian Danks, in his eloquent and insightful article on the film say that

Point Blank is by no means the first film to deal with the corporatisation of criminality – The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) and such late 1940s noirs as I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1948) already start to make this move – but it combines this thematic preoccupation with a revisionist abstraction of the codes, iconography and geography of the genre. In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films narrativise this shift but Point Blank is more concerned with the abstraction of physical space and temporality that accompanies such a change. Late 1960s Los Angeles ultimately provides a kind of Purgatory that Walker needs to pick or bludgeon his way through. But although Walker is a very physical presence who metes out some form of violence to many of the characters he meets, as well as whole range of inanimate objects, he is actually not directly responsible for any of the multiple deaths that pepper the film. Although he is a key catalyst for these “events” to occur, the deaths are equally facilitated by the hard-edged modernity of the world that defines these characters. Like such later figures as Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Walker is a man who is in the moment and explicitly out of time, a propulsively physical force and a “vaporous”, almost angelic vengeful essence. The streamlined minimalism of many of the film’s “environments” facilitates Walker’s seemingly straightforward quest, but this simplicity belies the considerably more complex structures (of power, finance, etc.) that are not mappable or readable onto these spaces.

Finally, if Point Blank's abstractions can be called cubist -and many scenes are constructed with a disregard to proper angles and rules of narrative filmmaking- it paves the road to another abstract gangster film, one that concerns itself with cubism and modernism, namely Jim Jarmusch's Limits of Control. And, although I can't articulate it, I would like to finish by saying that there is an interesting aspect of loss and elegy in the latter, which might be revealed through a comparison of the two films to be something quite significant.