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| Point Blank | 
 enlarge | Director: John Boorman
Actors: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O'connor, Lloyd Bochner
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $11.93
You Save: $8.05 (40%)
New (40) Used (10) Collectible (2) from $11.93
Avg. Customer Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 11405
Format: Color, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: Unrated
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 92
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: WARD67414D
ISBN: 1419807501
UPC: 012569674141
EAN: 9781419807503
ASIN: B00097DY2A
Theatrical Release Date: August 30, 1967
Release Date: July 5, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New and Factory Sealed Item Fast Shipping
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Product Description
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/26/2006 Run time: 92 minutes Rating: Nr
Amazon.com
Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and assisted by Angie Dickinson, as he desperately searches for someone, anyone, who can just give him his money. But if Walker is an extreme incarnation of the revenge-driven noir antihero, the modern syndicate has been transformed into a world of paper jungles and corporate businessmen, an alienating concept to the two-fisted, gun-wielding gangster. Boorman creates a hard, austere look for the film and fragments the story with flashes of painful memory, grafting the New Wave onto old genres with confidence and style. Haunting and brutal, Point Blank remains one of the most distinctive crime thrillers ever made. --Sean Axmaker
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 The Axe-Man Cometh December 25, 2008
Boorman spins an exquisite tapestry of paranoia, suspense, thrills and a chilling escape from a Kafka-esque nightmare, in this sparse, spare, super-existential sub-crime thrill-ride of a movie.
Lee Marvin is the last word in old-world machismo, and yet with his sharp suits, silver hair, pug nose and ice-cold attitude he is also the epitome of the here and now. Shot in 1967, Marvin's all-action, no-nonsense, death-warrior, is as plausible and as valid now as it was then. From Yul Brynner to Arnold to Mel Gibson, no one has done it better, not even Lee himself in movies like The Killers or Prime Cut. And yet, Lee's protagonist is here entirely subjugated to the demands of the plot, and that is in turn entirely at the mercy of the atmospheric web of nightmare, uncertainty and dread that constitute the entire meaning of the movie's title.
Rarely if ever has an action movie radiated out from a philosophical centre quite as exquisitely as this one.
Lee's aptly named Walker, is double-crossed by his best-friend and his wife and left to die. He can either die there and then, or he can choose to wade through the hell of his own existence and win back his money and his freedom. This is no dying man's delusion or dream, as other reviewers have suggested, this is a barely-alive man's only shot at cheating death and making it out alive and intact. The fact that he does is no cause for hoopla - the existential crisis, the fight-back and the victory all occur simultaneously in the viewer's mind over the course of 90 minutes of gangster-noir action - literally Point Blank. The movie appears and disappears into itself leaving only a few memories of Lee Marvin fighting in a bar, a James Brown-esque nightclub screecher having fun with white patrons, a bad guy falling off a roof and Angie Dickinson, exhausting her anger on Lee's indomitable masculinity.
Is the film also a political statement on the hellish impenetrability of the American political system post-Kennedy? Maybe, maybe not, but as a work of art it is staggering. You come away from all the guns and gangsters jiggery-pokery that consitute the foreground of the film, and you shake your head in wonder - just how did John Boorman pull off this zero-zero philosophical conceit??? this cinematic sleight-of-hand?? This is no product of a studio storyboard, but the handiwork of a master-craftsman.
If Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai is the action film all action films dream of becoming when they grow up, then Point Blank is the more or less the Holy Grail of the genre. Marvel, cogitate, gawp - and don't even dream of a sequel - cos there ain't one.
A movie so unique, mesmerising and wonder-arousing that it actually manages to out-Lee Marvin Lee Marvin!!! And that really is something you don't see every day.
 Point Blank Blank December 21, 2008
The movie arrived quickly, but there was no chapter list and the copy was a tad dark.
 Relentlessly deadpan...and I'd buy a ticket to see the Mel Brooks version. Still, not bad September 7, 2008
When his buddy, Mal Reese, with his wife, Lynne, looking on, puts two bullets into Walker right after they've high-jacked a big haul on Alcatraz island, Walker gets mad...and then gets even. Walker somehow survives those gunshots and a year later he returns. For the next hour and a half, Walker (Lee Marvin) is going to say once if he says it ten times, "I want my money back." The Organization is not about to accommodate Walker, even if Walker's money is only a measly $93,000. That includes Reese, who now has Walker's wife and who has become one of the Organization's top men, all of whom look like business CEOs. While Walker relentlessly goes after his money and works his way up the corporate criminal ladder, he leaves a trail of corpses behind. Walker is shrewd, violent and deadpan, and he won't take "No" for an answer. That sums up Point Blank.
It must have been tiring having to prove in life and in the movies that he really was the tough-as-nails, seen-it-all, uber-macho main man, part bully, part cynic. For me, Lee Marvin was at his best playing secondary character roles. As a lead, more often than not he simply brought more of the same to the screen, but in a larger frame. He was queasily watchable in, for instance, The Big Heat, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Men From Now (Special Collector's Edition) and, much later with star billing but in a character part, Gorky Park. But it was just pow, smash, bang in most of his star vehicles. If he'd been more willing to break out of his star persona, he might have been a memorable actor, not just a star. He did a superior job in the one role where he deliberately took a big risk, playing Hickey in the American Film Theater's television presentation of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. He not only placed himself deep in a complex role, he was working with very good actors, notably Robert Ryan and Fredric March. Marvin did a fine job, but then immediately returned to the same old same old.
As for Point Blank, there's no doubt that John Boorman keeps it moving, throws in some perhaps unintended as well as intended irony and a lot of intended violence. He keeps the focus on the relentless Walker and Marvin doesn't disappoint. Point Blank also hasn't aged very well, in my view, even with Marvin's dynamically impassive (or impassively dynamic) performance, with the artsy clomp clomp clomp of Walker's shoes and Lynne's monologue with flashbacks as examples. A strong plus is the performances of the secondary characters, especially Carroll O'Connor and Keenan Wynn. With all that deadpan relentlessness, I just can't get out of my mind what Mel Brooks could have done with Point Blank.
The DVD transfer looks just fine. There is a commentary track which features John Boorman and Steven Soderberg chatting together, as well as a couple of shorts on Alcatraz. If you visit San Francisco, don't forget to save a morning or afternoon for the boat ride to the island and the tour of the federal prison. It closed in 1963 and is a grim and interesting place. For those who may not know John Boorman very well, he's a fine director who, for the most part, managed to make his films his way. I especially like Deliverance (Deluxe Edition), Hope and Glory, The Emerald Forest and The General.
 Point Blank - Lee Marvin June 6, 2008
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
After reading the reviews online I purchased the video believing it would be another great performance by Lee Marvin and others.
He IS a great actor and yet, from just moments after it starts the director has him stoic, cold, acting strangely as tho in a coma, his actions in the fight scene are more like a faggot fighting for his purse instead of the man we all enjoyed in Marine/combat/fight scenes like Emporer of the North and Prime Cut ...
And the movie dragged on with bizarre directing of his actions to be partially there and barely acting like the man he was ... I guess the director was trying to exhibit odd emotional replies to the circumstances, but all it comes off is - a Poorly made movie for a Great actor. He was stymied of his natural acting abilities by this fool.
The music was offbeat also and added to the distorted style of mental frame of mind attempted by this offbeat director.
It was a waste of time and money to have ever made this film much less buy and sit through it until the end hoping it would finally get better.
In most cases Marvin looks away from anyone asking him or answering him as tho he has a care about what's going on . His facial expression is of being crazed almost !
Go ahead, make someones day by buying this junk to see if I'm wrong !!
I'll sell you mine right now for cheap !!
Hurry b/c I'll be taking it to the target range soon if it's not sold !
This icy cold revenge thriller creates a world all its own June 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Point Blank" is an icy cold revenge thriller from 1967, heavily influenced in style by the French "New Wave". The continual jump cutting and flashbacks are confusing and the cacophonous musical score date it somewhat, but this is an entertaining film right until the very end. "Point Blank" is one of the few films to successfully create a strange world all of its own.
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