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CAPSULE: POINT BLANK (1967)

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FEATURING: , , , , Lloyd Bochner, Carol O’Connor, Sharon Acker

PLOT: Walker is shot and left for dead by his partner during a heist; he survives, and returns to demand “the Organization” gives him back the $93,000 that was taken from him.

Still from Point Blank (1967)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Point Blank is pretty strange for a gangster revenge movie, but although it experiments with impressionistic techniques, it’s not too much more daring or avant-garde than other big budget art-house films of the period (say, Midnight Cowboy). Compare this to Branded to Kill, another 1967 release featuring a lone mobster facing off against a criminal organization, to see why Point Blank doesn’t quite muster the necessary weirdness to crack the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: With its fractured narrative and obscure feel, John Boorman’s second film, the revenge thriller Point Blank, was too ahead-of-its-time to be a hit even in freewheeling 1967. Although its critical reputation has grown enormously since its release, the movie has sadly been overlooked by the average cinephile even today. Point Blank is influenced by the French New Wave, not in terms of technique—everything looks slick and polished rather than rough and handmade—but by the spirit of reinventing genre pictures and investing them with existential ambiguity. Yet, it also remains true to Hollywood tough-guy antihero mythology, while amping up the sex and violence to then-shocking levels. It’s non-linear and confusingly told with flashbacks, memories and what could be dreams, but it’s really only disorienting in the six minute pre-credits opening where Lee Marvin’s betrayed and robbed Walker lies bleeding after being shot at point blank range. After that the movie quickly settles into a very clear and direct structure where Walker hunts down a mobster, asks for his money, kills him when he refuses, then sets his sights on the dead man’s direct superior, slaying his way up the ladder looking for someone with authority to cut him a $93,000 check.

Lee Marvin’s square-jawed squareness has never been put to cooler use than in Point Blank. Utilizing a vocabulary smaller than Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, he’s relentless and unflappable, standing like a rock while Angie Dickinson unleashes a fury of blows against him, then wordlessly turning on the TV when she collapses into an exhausted heap. Marvin even makes a tangerine shirt with a brown tweed jacket look hip. For fun, chart the number of people Walker actually kills versus the ones whom he simply manipulates into doing themselves in. Yet, as cool and mechanical as he is, Walker works as a character because he’s obsessed—the irrational way he barges into his wife’s apartment and unloads his gun into an empty bed in blind hope that her lover would be lying there tells us all we need to know about the sanity of his mission.

There are plenty of subtle dreamlike suggestions that what appears to be happening may not really be so, from the unnaturally stylized color schemes (the gray-on-gray of the compromised marital bedroom) to a mysteriously disappearing corpse. The enigmatic Yost, who shows up with clues when needed and who is willing to help Walker against “the Organization” for unspecified reasons, adds another layer of suspicion. The script is cagey about Walker’s ultimate fate, but in the story he functions as a revenant: a remorseless spirit that can’t be killed, returned to satisfy a debt. Walker is inhuman in his single-mindedness, but we root for him nonetheless. There is something quintessentially American in his struggle against a bureaucratic mafia for his slice of the pie—as a point of personal honor, not because he wants pie. Point Blank is packed with classic style and star power, and has the perfect ratio of art-house cool to gritty action.

Point Blank and the 1999 Mel Gibson feature Payback were both based on Donald Westlake’s novel “The Hunter.” John Boorman recalls that he and Lee Marvin loved the character of Walker, but hated the original treatment, and had the screenplay extensively rewritten. Boorman was not a fan of Gibson’s version of the story. “The script that he shot very much resembled the script that Lee Marvin threw out the window,” he quipped on the DVD commentary.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lee Marvin makes a perfect, unfazed human center to John Boorman’s bizarre, psychedelic universe in Point Blank.”–Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by PinstripeHourglass, who noted, “It’s not surrealistic weird, but it’s weird. Subtly weird, but very weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Point Blank (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

Point Blank (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

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    List Candidates, Reader Recommendations

    READER RECOMMENDATION: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002)

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    Reader recommendation by “Brad”

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Adam Sandler, , , Luis Guzman

    PLOT: Business owner Barry Egan (Sandler) deals with anger issues, seven abusive sisters, a sex phone con artist, and the appearance of a strange harmonium all while falling in love with a mysterious, yet sympathetic woman (Watson).

    Still from Punch-drunk Love (2002)
    WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With its lead’s compulsive abrupt violent behavior, an uneasy sense of loneliness, abstract color schemes by Jeremy Blake, and a wonderfully weird soundtrack by Jon Brion, this film is highly off-kilter for a romantic comedy.

    COMMENTS: Paul Thomas Anderson followed up his dramatic masterpiece Magnolia with this small-scale arthouse comedy/drama/character study. Adam Sandler was chosen for the role of troubled lead Barry Egan. Unlike the typical crude humor Sandler is known for, here he uses a restrained, subtle performance to capture Egan’s tantrums, loneliness, and troubled life. Egan is a unhappy business owner balancing work and his seven abusive sisters who taunt him about being gay and continuously call him at work. Barry comes across a harmonium that was sat on the side of the road by a mysterious van following an out of nowhere car crash (foreshadowing a later car crash with Sandler and Watson). Later, we explore Barry’s loneliness and his paranoia when he calls a sex phone operator who later begins to con Barry out of money, threatening and later sending out a group of brothers hired as hitmen to rough Egan up. This blackmail operation is ran by the “Mattress Man” (Philip Seymour Hofffman, in a hilarious role). Egan ends up meeting a mysterious, beautiful young woman, Lena (Watson) through his sister, the same woman earlier in the film he briefly talked to about leaving her car. He begins to fall in love over the course of the film attending a date at a restaurant that ends with them kicked out due to his uncontrollable temper. He then follows her to Hawaii, using frequent flyer miles earned from buying pudding. The hitmen are later defeated after a car crash wounds Lena, who is hospitalized. Barry confront the Mattress Man in a hilarious final showdown. The film ends with Barry running back to Lena, confessing all his problems and promising to never leave  again. Too weird to be a mainstream rom-com, too unpredictable and arthouse to please everyone, Paul Thomas Anderson retains his courage for experimenting with film and pulls an actual performance from Sandler. This is a MUST EXPERIENCE for any film fan looking to step outside the usual boundaries set by mainstream romantic comedy/dramas.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a weirdly sweet little love story… Anderson also throws in dark complications, including a sinister phone-sex scam, Barry’s strangely surreal sisters, his pudding-purchasing obsession and some very odd pillow talk.”–Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times (contemporaneous)

    Punch-Drunk Love (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

    Punch-Drunk Love (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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    Canonically Weird (The List)

    173. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

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    “Dream, little one, dream,

    Dream, my little one, dream.

    Oh, the hunter in the night

    Fills your childish heart with fright.

    Fear is only a dream.

    So dream, little one, dream.”

    Lullaby from Night of the Hunter (lyrics by Walter Schumann)

    Must See

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , Billy Chapin, ,

    PLOT: Harry Powell is a self-ordained Reverend during the Great Depression who makes a living by touring Appalachia and marrying widows, who disappear soon thereafter under mysterious circumstances. In prison for stealing a car, he shares a bunk with Ben Harper, a bank robber on death row who has refused to tell the authorities the location of the $10,000 he has stolen. After his release (and Harper’s execution), Rev. Powell finds the robber’s widow, and learns that his young son John knows where the fortune is hidden.

    Still from Night of the Hunter (1955)
    BACKGROUND:

    • The film is based on a 1953 novel by Davis Grubb. The book was a bestseller at the time of it’s release but was long out-of-print until a 2014 reprint.
    • Night of the Hunter‘s Harry Powell was based on real-life murderer Harry Powers, nicknamed “The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell,” a West Virginia-based killer responsible for the deaths of two widows and three children.
    • was Laugton’s first choice for Harry Powell but he turned down the role of the serial-killing misogynist preacher, thinking it might damage his career. Robert Mitchum had no such concerns and was eager to play the part.
    • Mitchum’s autobiography contains several inaccurate accounts of the filming, including the allegation that Laughton heavily rewrote James Agee’s original script (an accusation supported by Laughton’s widow Elsa Lanchester). Film scholars who studied Agee’s original script, which was discovered in 2003, reported that the director shot the film almost exactly as written.
    • This was the only film Charles Laughton ever directed. Although the story that he was so stung by the negative critical reaction to the movie that he never directed again is often repeated, Laughton himself claimed that he simply preferred directing theater to working on films.
    • Prior to shooting, Laughton screened silent films by D.W. Griffith to get a feel for the look he wanted for the movie.
    • In 1992, Night of the Hunter was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry.
    • Ranked #71 in Empire Magazine’s 2008 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. Ranked #2 on “Cahiers du Cinema”‘s list of the “100 Most Beautiful Movies.”

    INDELIBLE IMAGE: Pick a single image from Night of the Hunter? It’s a fool’s errand. As much as it hurts to pass up the vision of the “good” Reverend with his right hand of love wrestling his left hand of hate, or the dreamlike serenity of Willa Harper’s final resting place, we think the most meaningful image must come from the children’s flight downriver—specifically, we chose the shot of the skiff passing before the spiderweb, as John and Pearl (temporarily) float away from their murderous stepfather’s snares.

    WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Night of the Hunter is such a massive achievement that we’re invoking 366 Weird Movies’ sliding scale rule: the better a movie is, the less weird it needs to be to make the List. Not that Hunter isn’t strange, by Hollywood standards (and particularly by 1950s Hollywood standards). Film archivist Robert Gitt called this expressionist/Southern Gothic hybrid “the most unusual and experimental film made in Hollywood in the 1950s.” Perhaps that is why director Charles Laughton decided to bring cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who once bragged “I was always chosen to shoot weird things,” onto the crew. Hunter is packed with shadowy, stagey, artificial shots (contemporary critics complained that the effects—both narrative and visual—were “misty”). Mixing fairy tale menace and Freudian killer fathers while masquerading as a titillating potboiler, Hunter was so unique and unexpected that it slid right under the upturned noses of viewers in the 1950s, that most conformist-minded of decades. Generations since have remembered it fondly—well, in their nightmares, at least—and it has since been elevated into the canon of great movies. And now, of great weird movies.


    Original trailer for Night of the Hunter

     COMMENTS: An utterly original blend, Night of the Hunter is simultaneously a melodrama, a fairy tale, a film noir, a Southern Gothic, a Biblical Continue reading 173. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955) →

    Canonically Weird (The List)

    163. 3 WOMEN (1977)

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    “I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything but what they feel.”–Robert Altman (quoted in David Sterritt’s Criterion Collection essay)

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , , , Robert Fortier

    PLOT: A young girl named Pinky begins working at a spa in California, where she eventually becomes roommates with her idol, Millie, who is a few years older. Millie believes herself to be popular, inviting people over for dinner parties and out on dates, but in reality nearly everyone avoids her except for Pinky. Then, after a near-fatal accident, Pinky undergoes a radical personality change…

    Still from 3 Women (1977)
    BACKGROUND:

    • Robert Altman conceived the picture after a dream he had while his wife was hospitalized: he dreamed the title of the film, the location, that it involved personality theft, and that it would star Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek.
    • 3 Women was made without a traditional screenplay. Instead, together with writer Patricia Resnick, Altman devised a 50 page treatment. The movie was then shot in sequence, with Altman writing out the next day’s scenes the night before, and the actors improvising much of the dialogue. Duvall wrote all of her character’s diary entries herself.
    • The murals were painted by an otherwise nearly unknown hippie artist working under the name “Bodhi Wind.”
    • Duvall’s performance won her a Best Actress nod at the Cannes Film Festival.
    • The movie was not available on home video in any form until 2004, due to the distributors’ failure to negotiate rights for Gerald Busby’s avant-garde musical score.

    INDELIBLE IMAGE: The paintings that decorate the swimming pool walls: strange creatures with scaly legs and baboon faces, engaged in bizarre, violent courting rituals. A male stands with his arms outstretched and his stout penis hanging proudly between his legs while females scatter, looking over their shoulders and baring their fangs at him. Shots of these two murals, which inside the movie’s reality are painted by Janice Rule’s character, occur over and over throughout the film, including over the opening and closing credits. Oddly enough, the shot most associated with 3 Women—the one that illustrates the DVD cover and accompanies most reviews—doesn’t even occur in the film. The photograph of Sissy Spacek entwined in Shelly Duval’s arms as they recline against a fresco depicting one simian lizard creature strangling another was a promotional photo. 3 Women is that kind of movie: the type that’s best represented by something lying outside of its own boundaries.

    WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: 3 Women is based on an uneasy dream suffered by Robert Altman, and incredible performances by Sissy Spacek and (especially) Shelly Duvall turn it into a collaborative dream. Although most of the movie is naturalistic, with nothing happening that could not quite happen in our reality, there is nonetheless a dreadful sense of illusoriness, as if we’re seeing events through a gauze.


    Original trailer for 3 Women

    COMMENTS: Tucked away on the long stretch of nowhere between Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) lies 3 Women, the 1970s iteration Continue reading 163. 3 WOMEN (1977) →

    Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

    THE RULING CLASS (1972)

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    When I was halfway through writing this article, actor Peter O’Toole passed away. He serves as yet another example of  how pointless, asinine, vapid, and meaningless the Academy Awards are. Rightfully nominated a zillion times, O’Toole is in the fine company of such Academy Award losers as , , Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Richard Burton, Alfred Hitchcock, and . The Academy did eventually give O’Toole its condescending honorary Oscar, as it did to Chaplin, but that’s a mere smokescreen to mask their own artlessness.

    O’Toole’s performances ranged from great to quirky and interesting in films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Beckett (1964), Lord Jim (1965), Night of the Generals (1967), The Lion in Winter (1967), Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969), Murphy’s War (1971), The Ruling Class (1972), Man Friday (1975), Zulu Dawn (1979), The Stunt Man (1980), Masada (1981), My Favorite Year (1982), The Last Emperor (1987), and Venus (2006).  Naturally, as prolific as he was, he had his share of embarrassing bombs: Caligula (1979), Supergirl (1984), and, most of all, Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (2008). His last film is the soon to be released Katherine of Alexandria (2014).

    The Ruling Class was, almost immediately, a cult hit. It earned O’Toole yet another Oscar nomination, but he lost out to Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972). Although The Godfather is a better film and Brando’s performance was superb, I would stand with a tiny minority in arguing that O’Toole should have won.

    The Ruling Class is certainly one of O’Toole’s weirdest films, thus earning its cult reputation. He plays Jack, the 14th Earl of Gurney. Jack goes by “J.C.” because he believes himself to be none other than Jesus Christ. Jack’s daddy, the 13th Earl (Harry Andrews), pulls an Albert Dekker and hangs himself in a tutu. Paranoid schizo Jack shows up to run the estate in daddy’s place. Jack has had a life-size cross conveniently built in the castle where he can love everyone from the” bottom of my soul to the tip of my penis.”

    Still from The Ruling Class (1972)Peter Medak directed from Peter Barnes’ play and, with Peter O’ Toole starring, there is a lot of phallic symbolism afoot. Naturally, being a British movie of the 70s, there is plenty of other symbolism being bandied about as well, including a battle of misfit deities, an assault by an ape in a top hat, Ebenezer Scrooge as a phlegmatic bishop (Alastair Sim), a drunkard leftist butler (Arthur Lowe), a usurping by the Electric Messiah (Nigel Green), and Jack’s miraculous born again transformative “cure” from Jesus Christ (the God Of Love) to Jack the Ripper (the God of Wrath and Vengeance). Society’s acceptance of Jack as the serial-killing deity, as opposed to its rejection of Jack as pacifist god, is about as subtle as it sounds.

    Like many British films of the period, The Ruling Class is imbued with psychedelic surrealism. What sets it apart from films like The Magic Christian (1969) is its theatrical ensemble, topped by a bouncing-off-the-walls performance by  O’Toole. Even with the superb cast of Sims and Lowe, O’ Toole walks easily away with the film. Other than T.E Lawrence, J.C. may be his best performance.

    The movie is inevitably (and deliriously) dated, with its psychedelic first half giving way to Clockwork Orange territory in the second half. The Ruling Class’ stage origins are keenly felt, and the vaudevillian musical numbers add to the lunacy of this genre-proof film. Medak’s direction is acidic and idiosyncratic. He handles blasphemy in the best “theater of the absurd” type of way. How does flower child J.C. know he is God? “When I pray, I find I am talking to myself.”

    The Criterion Collection debatably erred in restoring 20 excised minutes to the film, making The Ruling Class excessive, but perhaps even more bizarre, in its 154 minute version. Apart from that, there is the usual exemplary Criterion extras, including home movies supplied by Medak, excellent commentary tracks, photo galleries, and a beautifully remastered, digital print.