Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Point Blank

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Boorman (1967)

    A man hunts down other men, who owe him his share of the proceeds of a robbery they did together on Alcatraz island.   It could be a B-movie plot and much of the acting in Point Blank is undistinguished (the star, Lee Marvin, is a notable exception).  As a piece of film-making, though, it’s ambitious, and the incongruence of style and substance – technical sophistication versus formula plot and characters – makes the picture more remarkable.  John Boorman concentrates on the geometry of modern buildings and their component parts and contents:  doors, windows, slatted blinds, striped curtains.  The scale of the physical settings, mainly in and around Los Angeles, is often huge:  one of the most impressive moments in Point Blank is the shooting of the pin-sized figure of a man who’s trying to run away in a vast, desert-like space.  Boorman and his cinematographer Philip H Lathrop use the sunshine of LA where you might expect noir darkness – this anticipates the use, in the outdoor sequences of Chinatown, of light on the subject as a counterpoint to shadowy goings on.  There’s a merciless quality to this light as there is to Boorman’s spectacular staging of the several deaths that occur in the course of the film.  There’s an increasing consonance too between the director’s and the film’s protagonist Walker’s preoccupation with how things get done – and between the soulless landscape and that of Walker’s own mind.   (In the end, Walker doesn’t bother to collect his money even when it’s there for the taking.)   The source material is The Hunter, a 1962 novel (the first of a long series featuring the same central character), which Donald E Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark.  The screenplay is by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse.   Whoever decided on the change of title earned their fee:  the literal meaning is obvious but Point Blank also gets across the existential emptiness and nullity of the world that Boorman creates.

    The privileging of style over substance in the crime thriller genre has become very familiar in the decades since Point Blank was made.  But it must have looked innovative at the time of its original release; and because this is unmistakeably a 1960s piece, it’s distinctive from much of what followed – so that it still seems unusual, almost aberrant.  I didn’t enjoy watching but I understand and accept the cachet the film has acquired.  Lee Marvin’s combination of a persistent persona, utter physical relaxation and deadpan verbal wit makes him seem a hybrid of an old-time star and a modern actor.  The volatile relationship between Marvin’s Walker and a woman called Chris is central to, and the strongest human element of, Point Blank.  As Chris, Angie Dickinson’s prettiness and great figure are made more interesting by her used, tawdry quality.  One of the best sequences in the film occurs when Walker and Chris are in a house together:  he wonders where she’s got to – she’s always one room ahead of him.  Walker’s search begins in a vast kitchen in which Chris has turned on a noisy orchestra of electrical appliances.  His disorientation is complete when, in a games room, she whacks him over the head with a pool cue.  The cast also includes Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, Michael Strong, Lloyd Bochner, Sharon Acker, James Sikking and John Vernon.  The opening credits include ‘Introducing John Vernon’:  he’s an unusually mature debutant (thirty-five) but this was indeed Vernon’s first appearance in cinema, although he was already well known as a stage and television actor.

    9 April 2013

  • Plein soleil

    Old YorkerFilm review

    René Clément (1960)

    The Talented Mr Ripley – the first half of it anyway – is Anthony Minghella’s best work but this earlier adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel is better.   To be fair to Minghella, though, not the least of the fascinations of René Clément’s version (the usual English title is Purple Noon) comes from comparing it with the 1999 remake.   Why is the Clément movie superior?   First, he and his co-writer Paul Gégauff limn the callous hedonism of Tom Ripley and Philippe (as he’s renamed here) Greenleaf more casually but more incisively than Minghella – in the young men’s joking treatment of a blind beggar on the streets of Rome, in Philippe’s cruelty when he banishes Tom from his yacht to a dinghy to burn for hours in the blazing heat.   Second, Clément substantiates this kinship between the pair by making them physically two of a kind:  Alain Delon (Tom) and Maurice Ronet (Philippe) are made to look remarkably similar, given that the actors don’t particularly resemble each other.  Because Matt Damon doesn’t look anything like Jude Law, Tom Ripley’s impersonation of Dickie Greenleaf in Minghella’s version is absorbing as an act of will but the implications of resemblance in this adaptation are richer.   The same goes for the homosocial-homosexual aspects of Plein soleil.  Minghella expressed these more explicitly in Dickie’s bathroom and in the jealousy that brought about his murder.  Here they are less stressed but form a more expressive, prevailing texture.   And while the idea of Tom’s killing Philippe is discussed coolly and hypothetically between the two of them, the crime happens suddenly, unexpectedly, briefly.

    The print I saw at BFI obviously hadn’t aged well but because the vividness of Henri Decaë’s palette still (literally) shone through, it actually served to heighten your sense of how dazzling the original must have been.  The breeziness of Nino Rota’s score captures the amorality of the protagonist.  (There’s no music during the key sequences out at sea, as if to suggest that the main characters are confronting each other there without the masks they wear in the presence of other people in social settings.)  Alain Delon, whose first major role this was, conveys Tom Ripley’s lack of conscience perfectly:  Tom is seldom stressed – he gets on with doing what he needs to do to further his ends.   If he stops to think, it’s a calculation of his next move, never a reflection on his criminal behaviour.  While Delon and Ronet are in a different class from Matt Damon and Jude Law, other members of the Minghella cast compare very favourably with their precursors in Plein soleil.  As Freddy Miles, Bill Kearns isn’t a patch on Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Although the character is different anyway (a woman in the ballet world here), Ave Ninchi’s Signora Gianna corresponds in the scheme of the story to the Cate Blanchett role in The Talented Mr Ripley and Blanchett wins hands down.  Marie Laforet eventually develops an arresting aura of misery as Marge but Gwyneth Paltrow is much more various.

    Like The Talented Mr Ripley, Plein soleil goes on a bit too long.  Unlike the Minghella film (and the Patricia Highsmith novel), it ends with Tom about to get his comeuppance.  The ending comes both as a surprise and a letdown and it may signal a failure of nerve on Rene Clément’s part – a fear that allowing the cold-blooded killer to prosper would be unacceptable to audiences.  But the sense of anti-climax you experience has a strong point too:  it makes you realise how complicit with Alain Delon’s psychopathic charmer you’ve become in the course of the film.

    16 September 2010

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