POINT BLANK

Walker (Lee Marvin) and his colleagues plan a cash robbery on the former prisoner island of Alcatraz but he is double-crossed by his colleague, Mai, who shoots him and leaves him for dead. Walker, the vengeful loner, decides to retrieve the money he believes he was cheated out of, leading to a confrontation with a corporate crime syndicate. The friend who betrayed him and left him for dead is now in the upper circles of the syndicate and is an eminent respected citizen. We watch as, step by relentless step, the avenger smashes through a white-collar facade.

Boorman's stylised and elliptical revenge thriller, based on a novel by Richard Stark (the pen name for Donald Westlake), bristles with modern expressionistic techniques to keep the narrative driving through a criss­cross of flashbacks. Point Blank marked a new high in the aesthetics of violence, with a garnish of grim humour and an ironic ending to counterbalance the romantic impulse of such a story. Marvin's performance as the brooding elemental thug is one of his finest and is perfectly complemented by the seductive Angie Dickinson (who had previously been roughed up by Marvin in Don Siegel's The Killers [1964]).