Along the way, he joins up with Chris (Angie Dickinson), his sister-in-law, and the key to finding Reese. Each man who refuses to pay Walker ends up weighing a few extra ounces in lead, and he moves on to the next man. He then infiltrates the organization Reese belongs to, hunting down the top executives one by one. He finds his wife first, who sided with Reese to double-cross him. All he wants is his share of the money, $93,000. Walker is single-minded now he’s not interested in revenge, not really. Yet somehow he survives and swims away from Alcatraz. These scenes are edited in a quick and disjointed way, the jumbled memories of Walker as he is on the verge of death. He then shoots an unsuspecting Walker, leaving him for dead. But things don’t go as planned - Reese shoots and kills the money’s intended recipients, threatening to bring the organization down on their heads. A helicopter will drop off a bag of money, they’ll knock out the men who are supposed to pick it up, then split the spoils. Reese is in debt to a criminal organization, so he proposes that they intervene in a clandestine money drop at Alcatraz, then abandoned.
Shortly before the shooting, he runs into an old friend, Reese (scumbag extraordinaire John Vernon, in his first big role).
The movie then backs up a bit to explain how we’ve gotten to Walker lying bullet-riddled on the ground. The bullets seem to pick Walker up and swing him through the air before he gracefully lands on the concrete floor. We have no idea why he has been shot, but it’s done in an almost balletic manner. The film is initially non-linear, opening with an assaultive and out-of-context scene of Walker being shot in a prison cell.
Point Blank displays its modernist pedigree from the opening minutes. (It would be Boorman’s first Hollywood film.) Marvin met English director John Boorman while shooting The Dirty Dozen, which would become a runaway hit, and talked him into directing an adaptation of The Hunter. In 1967, actor Lee Marvin was riding high - he had risen quickly from playing memorable hoods in The Big Heat (1953) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) to larger supporting roles like the eponymous outlaw of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), eventually winning an Oscar in 1965 for Cat Ballou. It was the first to feature the character Parker (changed to Walker in the film), an almost psychopathic thief with little concern for human life, who nevertheless lives by a simple golden rule: don’t screw him, and he won’t screw you. Westlake under his Richard Stark pseudonym. The genesis of Point Blank begins with The Hunter (1962), a crime novel written by Donald E. But Point Blank is so forward-looking, so fun, and so damn cool, that it’s easy to forget how long it has been around. Sure, you can tell from looking at a random clip the colors, the grain of the footage, and the slightly tinny nature of the sound all gel with a movie from 1967. It seemed to make sense, but was still a shocking realization. Fifty years - is that even possible? I went through the math: 1967, so that’s five decades ago.
When I started to gather my thoughts to write about Point Blank for its anniversary, I did a bit of a double take when I saw how old the movie was.