Point Blank (1967) As Frank drives, winding endlessly along Route 330 towards Arrowhead Lake, Iris stretches her pasty, taut and muscular gams and rests them on rest on Impala’s cracked green dashboard. She fishes in the cooler and selects a cherry Little Hug and gnaws at the foil top with her tiny mousy teeth. Whatever happened next, didn’t matter. It was over, of course. That’s just tricks. The relationship was just a spinning scrambled flashback of parties, showers, movies, quiet nights, etc. they all swirled around in Frank’s head as he tried to concentrate on the dashed yellow line. The wins and losses came to him like they did to Lee Marvin as Walker, bleeding and betrayed and near death in an empty Alcatraz cell block. Maybe Frank should have taken a cue from Walker, double-crossed by his wife and her lover, Mal Reese in Point Blank (available July 5, 2005 Warner Home Video). Escaping both death and the Rock, Walker vows to get his 93 grand back, no matter who gets in the way. His wife and Reese are both soon enough bumped off, though (she ODs, he wings naked out of a window in an awful primitive screen effect), Walker finds a long way to go before he gets his money back. They say Lee Marvin, getting into his role, hit John Vernon (playing Reese, his rival) so hard during rehearsal for the fight scene, that the man cried. But, Lee Marvin, of course, is known for his emotional, though stoic, additions to a part; consider his visible rage at Toshirô Mifune, in another Boorman film, Hell in the Pacific (1968) a year later (both actors were WWII vets—on opposite sides). The film positively seethes. Two years later he'd be singing in Paint Your Wagon (Logan 1969). So, nobody's perfect. Point Blank, however, offers a grand slathering of Hollywood noir with a touch of French New Wave, as epitomized by Walkers psychedelic dreams while his wife dies in the next room. As such, it is much closer to something like Pierrot Le Fou (Godard 1969) than a film like Coogan’s Bluff (Seigel 1968), which more directy tries to insert classic tough guys into 1960s counter culture. Plus, it offers great wide shots of Alacatraz and other California locales. These shots alone make the pan and scan TV version simply un-watchable in retrospect. And speaking of late 60s tough guy movies, could “the Organization” Marvin is up against, be the same “the Organization” McQueen is up against (Bullitt 1968)? Maybe not… And in the best scene, as has been said before, Angie Dickinson, tires herself out slapping around Walker. He merely goes for the TV remote. Très elegant! Carroll O’Connor (All in the Family 1971-1979) makes a somewhat disappointing appearance towards the end of the film as Brewster, one of the organization’s headmen. To many, O’Connor is possibly the greatest actor to grace the small screen, particularly in his ability to pull off the complex character of Archie Bunker through the TV series' infamous warm close-ups. How sad to see him as a cartoonish businessman who stays so unnaturally distant from the camera. But Frank and Iris have found a secluded picnic spot near the lake and Frank pulls out a matchbook on which to note his last impressions of the outing: iris steps forward and frowns at the safety on her 9mm. she enters a patch of light streaking through thick tree branches, her freckled skin lights like a planetarium show i digest a freckle on her right bicep my favorite of the set it is over for us her china thighs are rock-solid and also freckled like the cinnamon sprinkled over the whipped cream in that morning’s lattes her hair, a fake, sexy red i imagine what she felt like smooth and cool but, i wouldn’t know —frank