Last year, I read The Hunter, published in 1963 by Richard Stark (pen name of lauded mystery writer Donald E. Westlake) and found it a highly readable exercise in the thriller genre—its spare, brutally efficient prose seamlessly wedded to the merciless nature of its protagonist, Parker, a man double-crossed by both his wife and conniving partner-in-crime, who escapes death and vows recompense through violent means. The narrative wastes little time in getting Parker to his objective(s), and there is a kind of lurid fascination in experiencing how Parker tramples over and coerces his targets.
This is not the brooding noir PI wading through murky moral waters; Parker is a man of decisive action for whom morals are secondary to his own base fulfillments. It’s not that he is some unfeeling Terminator, although there are similarities in how Parker can get what he wants out of his victims by casually trespassing social norms they are unprepared to have violated. Parker cares enough about society that he will go to such extreme lengths to secure his special freedom in it; but it really is those lengths that make the difference, and which characterize his particular breed of criminality.
The Hunter‘s quick, punchy plot is the type that’s perfectly transferable to motion pictures, and in 1967, they did just that, although for legal reasons stipulated by Stark himself, they changed the name of the protagonist from “Parker” to “Walker,” the setting from New York/Chicago to San Francisco/Los Angeles, and its title became Point Blank. Directed by John Boorman, the script was deemed by both Boorman and lead actor Lee Marvin as insufficient until screenwriter Alex Jacobs was brought on for an overhaul. Together, they altered the atmosphere, tone, and dialogue of the narrative in order to better convey the state of Walker’s wounded psyche, a detail not explicitly treated in the source material.
Though the aforementioned changes may not render Point Blank a totally faithful adaptation of Stark’s novel, its general shape and main cast of characters are retained, with its prime attraction being Lee Marvin’s forceful yet surprisingly vulnerable take on the avenging conman. His Walker is almost as brutal as Stark’s Parker, bullying any and all into submission regardless of gender, but here he is more noticeably moved by human feeling, especially that of mourning and sexual desire. And Marvin’s bulldog-ish mien is a perfect fit for the profile described by Stark in The Hunter:
…His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.
And right after, here is something of the personality Marvin brings to life onscreen:
The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.
The office men drove by, clutching their steering wheels, and hardly noticed him. Just a bum walking on the bridge. Didn’t even own a car. A few of them saw him and remembered themselves before they’d made it when they didn’t have a car. They thought they were empathizing with him. They thought it was the same thing.
But again, while Parker is a ruthless killer, Walker takes pains to avoid such outcomes, as one of the characters remarks deep into the film. And from the very beginning of Point Blank, Walker is set up as something of a patsy, wronged by Mal Reese (John Vernon), who steals his woman and takes for himself the nearly two-hundred grand they’d nabbed from ambushing a criminal operation’s exchange of assets. It sets out with the ambush and Walker’s seeming death via gunshots, courtesy of Mal, at point blank range, and this arrangement (which the narrative non-linearly returns to, throughout) really makes it seem like Walker’s nigh-psychotic behavior stems from the trauma induced by his wife Lynn’s (Sharon Acker), and Mal’s, betrayal; whereas in the book, Stark introduces Parker as a brute, and gives every indication that the man was who he was before the botched operation.
There is a very obvious attempt on the part of the filmmakers to render Walker a more “sympathetic” character, so that when he goes on his rampage, his actions are “understandable”—he is even given a scene of almost boyish tenderness when the film flashes back to Lynn and Walker’s meet-cute. There are good moments that come out of this, such as the scene(s) following Lynn’s overdose, when the interiors of her home seemingly deteriorate, and her body vanishes, leaving Walker in Spartan emptiness. When he drops a bottle of expensive perfume in the bathroom he had earlier ransacked, and its liquid mingles with the other shattered contents, is this signaling the further breakdown of Walker’s mental state?
In actuality, the scene as it appears in the final cut was a departure from Jacobs’s screenplay (discussed by the writer himself in a revelatory interview), in which the odd cuts that confuse the passage of time are actually given solid context: Walker cleans the home of Lynn’s body and belongings in a state of mourning/shock over several days. But how it ended up in Boorman and editor Henry Berman’s cut was far more mysterious, and closer to the sort of European arthouse films that Boorman desired to emulate.
I myself am torn as to whether I prefer Stark’s amoral thug or Marvin’s avenger of throttled anguish. The brisk efficiency of the novel is gone, for the movie jams in needless subplots involving characters absent from The Hunter: mysterious enabler Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Chris (Angie Dickinson), Lynn’s sister, whom Walker entertains affection for. To my mind, Parker is a more unconventional, and daring, anti-hero than Walker; one does not relate to, or “root” for, Parker, yet one is compelled by his actions nonetheless, despite their brutality. By contrast, Walker’s sins are much lighter, and are almost begging to be excused/contextualized by the film—and while Marvin cuts a striking figure as Walker, the material fails to lift Walker up out of the genre confines it so desperately wishes to escape.
But that’s not to denigrate Marvin totally, as he does solid work with what he’s given. The whole cast, it should be said, is quite good, but the other main attraction of Point Blank apart from its performances is its visual attractiveness. There are many beautiful shots, such as those capturing the San Francisco skyline, or satisfyingly symmetrical frames that strive, perhaps, to mirror the single-minded purity of Walker’s mission as it drives towards climax:
Or perhaps it’s a visual comment on the neo-noir itself, since Point Blank is often touted as the genre’s progenitor; its moral aridity, and new corporate setting, replacing the shadowy (yet still steeped in traditional notions of) justice found in classic noir. Walker may or may not be stifling trauma, but one thing is for certain: he wants his $93,000, and will stop at nothing to regain the share owed to him. And look at those beams of the corporate office shown above. Time and again, Boorman repeats these visual motifs throughout the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, a desert in more ways than one—itself a repetition on the desolate symmetries, the iron bars, of Alcatraz, where the film begins.
And of course, there is that bravura sequence of Walker’s stride reverberating down the long hallway, intercut with Lynn’s preparations, completely unaware of her impending doom—like the Reaper’s metronome. It’s stylistic flourishes like that which help distinguish Point Blank, flawed though it may be, from its source material as a quality work of art only cinema can produce.
[Note: In May I reviewed the Jim Jarmusch film The Limits of Control, which I mentioned takes some visual cues from Point Blank. These might be worthy companion pieces, and are worth pairing for the aesthetic appeal alone.]
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