Year of Release: 1967
Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse, based on the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)
Starring: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn,
Running Time: 92 minutes
Genre: Crime, action, thriller
On Alcatraz Island, three criminals: Walker (Marvin), his best friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and Walker's wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker) pull off a robbery. However Walker is shot by Reese and left for dead in a cell, as Reese and Lynne make off with the stolen money. A year later Walker is back in San Francisco and sets off on a violent quest for revenge and to collect the money that he is owed, pitting him against a powerful criminals syndicate known as "The Organisation".
Judged by the basic plot, this film, adapted from the pulp thriller The Hunter by Richard Stark (a pseudonym for author Donald Westlake) may appear to be little more than an average revenge thriller, of the type that we have all seen umpteen times before, but, in the hands of British director John Boorman, it's elevated to a strange type of art. It makes use of distorted camera angles, strange ellipses and incongruities, an almost steam of consciousness editing style, and even the stripped down, bare bones plot, to make a strangely disorientating experience. The film opens with Walker (whose first name is never revealed) being shot several time in a prison cell in Alcatraz. The gunman, Walker's supposed friend Mal Reese runs off with Walker's wife, Lynne, and the loot. Clues as to what brought them there are revealed in fragmentary flashbacks. Then the scene shifts to the outside as a badly injured Walker prepares to plunge into the waters of San Francisco Bay, while a voice over (explained to be an announcer on a tourist boat) explains that escape from Alcatraz is impossible. We next see Walker on said boat, some time later, apparently none the worse for his experience. I have explained the opening in some detail because there is a theory about the film that Walker died in the opening scene on Alcatraz, and the rest of the film is his dying revenge fantasy. This is a reasonable reading, as the film follows the inexorable flow of dream logic. There are odd discrepancies and omissions, characters appear and disappear with no explanation, and the jarringly sudden changes in location, as well as the frequent sudden flashback scenes. In one scene, Angie Dickinson who plays Chris, Walker's sister in law who helps him in his quest, says "you really did die on Alcatraz", and later she asks him "why don't you just lay down and die?" There is also the sinister Yost (Keenan Wynn) who seems to guide Walker on his quest for his own purposes. Walker is a man out of time and place. He doesn't understand the workings of The Organisation, which is now a seemingly respectable corporation doing unexplained criminal activities and work out of a slick, expensive office block (floor eleven for mergers and acquisitions, floor twelve for murders and executions). The killers work out of the corner office with secretaries. Walker comes up time and again against the corporate structure. All he wants is the money that he was owed from the job. The granite-faced Lee Marvin plays Walker as something like the Terminator in a suit. Throughout he barely registers any emotion. He's a man without a past or a future. There is no sense of satisfaction when he exacts his revenge. He exists for nothing more than his quest for the money. This can be enjoyed as a simple straight forward action thriller, and it is full of great action sequences, but it is much more than that. It's one of the best action films of the 1960s.
Lee Marvin fires Point Blank
